Paygo Pelosi and the austerity brigade
The new Congress gets sworn in on Thursday and the drama has shifted from whether or not Nancy Pelosi will have the votes to be Speaker (she appears to have plenty) to whether dissatisfaction with the rules package she crafted will bring it down. Underneath it all is a fundamental debate about spending, the debt and the deficit.
There are two pieces of the package in particular that are facing objections from the left: a weakened climate change committee with no subpoena power, and the reinstatement of paygo, of which Pelosi has long been a champion.
Paygo -- short for “pay as you go” -- requires that any new government spending be offset either by tax increases or by spending cuts elsewhere. The effect is to handcuff progressive legislation and even to tie up tiny measures that you wouldn’t think would cost government money. (A bill on DC voting rights was held up over paygo issues.)
One thing paygo does is centralize power in leadership and in committee chairs. There are only so many offsets and if you require that every piece of legislation have an offset, you need to go to leadership to get that offset. It’s also just bad economics and politics -- there’s nothing inherently wrong with running a deficit. A public deficit is just another way of saying private surplus. Cutting the deficit means you get a smaller private surplus and people lose jobs. Why do that on purpose?
As we scooped today, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be voting against the rules package, as will Ro Khanna (he scooped himself on Twitter). Tim Ryan has joined them, but to block the rules package, opponents would still need 15 more no votes from Democrats. (All Republicans will vote no.)
Meanwhile, the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Reps. Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal, announced they are supporting the rules package even though it includes paygo. Here’s my take on why: Over the past several weeks, they fought Pelosi for several different things. They wanted proportional representation for CPC members on "A" committees and they won that. They wanted to overturn the stupid rule that required a 3/5ths vote for tax increases, and they won that.
They wanted to get rid of paygo and lost that. So they pocketed their wins and agreed to it, rather than risk what they'd gotten. They also said they were given assurances that paygo would be waived before it would block major progressive policy, which raises the obvious question: Then why the hell is it in there? (If you want to get into the weeds, a few former congressional aides discuss paygo and how it affects legislation in this twitter thread.)
Here's David Dayen’s story today.
Yesterday we published an adapted excerpt of the Steve Mnuchin book, by Rebecca Burns and Dave Dayen, helpfully headlined, Steve Mnuchin is a Dunce. If you bought it already, please leave a review, even if it’s just one sentence.
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