1 year ago
40
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is back to its old self. It had a wobble during the Trump years, abandoning the Republican president in the interest of national stability. But now the group has decided to throw its lot in with the Freedom Caucus and economic terrorism, all in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” The Chamber (and the fat cats it represents) is encouraging House Republicans to blow everything up. They don’t seem to want President Joe Biden to stop the U.S. from defaulting on its debt for the first time in history. The right-leaning organization doesn't generally back Democrats at the same pace it backs Republicans, even though the economy historically does better and grows faster under Democratic leadership.
Chamber leaders have written to Biden to tell him that using his constitutional authority to bypass Congress and suspend the debt ceiling “would be as economically calamitous as a default by a failure to lift the debt limit in a timely manner.” To be more specific, the letter writer is Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s chief policy officer and a former senior aide to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, so you can totally trust him.
This isn’t new for the Chamber. They were pushing for “an end to gridlock” and “bipartisan” action from the moment the House Republicans took control in January. Notably, there hadn’t been gridlock in the first two years of Biden’s term; Democrats got a lot of stuff done! No, the gridlock happened when Republicans took over. But it’s a nice trigger word for them to use when they want to force Democrats into doing economically dangerous stuff, like the other thing the Chamber was urging back in January: “potential overhauls to entitlement programs.”
