Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is the man in the hot seat today as outraged critics on the Right condemn his Plan B proposal to end the stalemated national debt ceiling negotiations with President Obama, and critics on the Left hail it as a dagger aimed at the heart of limited government. Erick Erickson, RedState.com’s fiery leader, wasted no time in branding Plan B a “sellout” that undercuts and isolates House Republicans, and McConnell as a “Pontius Pilate” leading the way to Republican caving on the national debt ceiling.
Though not always expressed in such uncompromising terms, Erickson’s assessment was echoed widely across the Right side of the blogosphere. Others on the Right, most notably The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, were more measured, noting that “the plan isolates House Republicans, it undercuts their [tentative] plan to offer an aggressive debt limit proposal of their own, it turns their principled intransigence from a possible strength to a certain liability, and it virtually ensures that, in the event of default, Republicans — not the White House — will be blamed.” And some on the Right, most notably the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, praised Plan B because it would “force Mr. Obama to take ownership of any debt-limit increase. If the president still insists on a tax increase, then Republicans will walk away from the talks.”
Meanwhile, Plan B drew cheers on the Left, such as this from Talking Points Memo, which lauded McConnell’s proposal because it “undermined the basic vision of the conservative movement: that decoupling taxes and spending would cause revenue and outlay arrows to diverge; and that when faced with the resulting unsustainable debt load, the country’s representatives, pushed by powerful interest groups, would keep the tax rates and scotch social programs.”
Despite its wildly inaccurate description of the strategic purpose behind tax cuts, TPM’s analysis zeroes in on a fundamentally important consideration: What would adoption of Plan B or some variation thereof mean for the future of the conservative movement and the long march to restore limited government? Plan B would give the president three opportunities to propose debt ceiling increases and identify matching spending cuts. Congress could only stop the chief executive with a two-thirds vote for a resolution of disapproval. This would effectively cede to the president something very near unilateral power to set the national debt ceiling. Thus, Plan B would accelerate the steady accretion since the New Deal of power away from Congress to the president, and extend that accretion into the most basic power the Founders, at Article I, Section 8, gave to the first branch, keeper of the federal purse strings.
The Founders purposely gave Congress exclusive power to borrow money and levy taxes, as well as final approval on all federal spending. Plan B negates that intent, leaving Congress as little more than an adviser to a chief executive with powers of a distinctly imperial hue. This surely is not what McConnell intends, nor is it an outcome that most Americans would desire, regardless of their partisan orientation. But merely not wanting such a result won’t prevent it happening.
