Ted Cruz: I Will Not Object to the Quick Passage of a Debt Deal

If unanimous consent is had in the Senate, the Senate can skip some of the process usually required for a vote -- such as (as @gabrielmalor noted) rules about waiting three days between introduction of a bill and a vote.

Earlier Hot Air noted Kelly Ayotte complaining that Ted Cruz would have no reason to insist on a three-day wait for a fait accompli.

“It is up to him,” she said on CNN’s “New Day.” “I would hope that he wouldn’t [delay a vote]. I mean in the Senate, obviously, in terms of certain timeframes, senators can cause you to run out the clock. But what is he trying to gain at this point.”

Well, Cruz now says he won't delay.

I imagine he'll still vote against it, of course.

This is a very complicated thing because people are all over the map of this whole situation. Some actually want to bump up against the debt ceiling, believing it won't result in default. Well, I've been convinced on that, but that still permits Barack Obama to choose which of the United States' spending priorities he should honor, and which he should dishonor, and blame it on the Republicans.

People keep noting that, for example, the large category of "Welfare & Other Spending" could be cut in half in order to not run over the debt limit. True, but does anyone think Obama would cut Welfare & Other Spending? No, he'd cut the military, and scale back Social Security checks, and blame us.

For anyone who says "He could couldn't get away with that politically" -- well, just these past two weeks he's gotten away with using armed Political Police to keep veterans out of their own monuments as well as a disastrous ObamaCare rollout.

This idea that if we escalate further we win sounds, to me, like a gambler who thinks the next big bet will change his luck. Could happen, in a fair game... In a fair game, the odds of the next big bet being a winner are about 50/50.

But the game is rigged. I think the odds are more like 1%/99%.

So, there are people who want to bump up against the debt ceiling but not default; there are people who actually want to default; there are people who don't want to default or bump up the debt ceiling but have claimed they wouldn't mind doing so as an attempt, as is often done in negotiations, to effect a cavalier posture and thus compel one's opponent to make concessions; and, of course, there's most of the establishment, who never wanted to do any of this, but have done it as a bit of Conservative Politics Kabuki to convince the base that they're responsive to constituent pressure.

But we always knew -- or I knew, and I imagine you knew -- that while they were willing to engage in Kabuki for a while, they were not on board with going up against the debt ceiling.

So we knew this day was coming. Or, again, a lot of us did. The Establishment could be brought, against their will, to use the debt ceiling as leverage in negotiations, but they were always going to stop when the debt ceiling approached.

posted by Ace at 01:09 PM

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