Why didn't the Democrats pass a debt ceiling increase that would last until after the elections of 2024?

[Ted King]

I read this today:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/27/us/po...limit.html

“I always worry about the debt ceiling,” Ms. Yellen told The New York Times in an interview on her flight from New Delhi to Bali, Indonesia, in which she urged Democrats to use their remaining time in control of Washington to lift the debt limit beyond the 2024 elections. “Any way that Congress can find to get it done, I’m all for.”

Democrats did not heed Ms. Yellen’s advice. Instead, the United States has spent most of this year inching toward the brink of default as Republicans refused to raise or suspend the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit without capping spending and rolling back parts of President Biden’s agenda.

And coincidentally right after that I read this:

https://jabberwocking.com/the-debt-ceili...ins-fault/

"The debt ceiling fiasco is Joe Manchin’s fault"

The real story is that the Senate was split 50-50 and Democrats were missing a vote even for reconciliation. I'm sure you can guess whose vote it was:

The administration has determined that if it were to go the reconciliation route on the debt limit, it would face likely opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).

....Already, Manchin has expressed reluctance to act on the debt limit with only Democratic votes, though he’s declined to rule it out completely. “I don’t think it should go to reconciliation,” he said Tuesday. “My goodness, it’s something we’ve always worked together on.”

According to Politico at the time, "That’s left White House officials to all but abandon efforts for a lame-duck move they once hoped might head off a potentially disastrous showdown with the House GOP majority next year."

In short, we are now facing a debt ceiling crisis thanks to Joe Manchin. That's it.

Thanks Joe for making us put up with Republican blackmail again even though the Democrats never use the debt ceiling to blackmail Republicans. I know and appreciate that Manchin is a crucial person in the Democrats having control of the Senate so I'm not down on him about everything. But this... yeah, I am.

[vision63]

The whole point of what you read is designed to divide Democrats

[pdq]

The whole point of Manchin is to divide Democrats, for his personal West-Virginia benefit.

[vision63]

pdq wrote:
The whole point of Manchin is to divide Democrats, for his personal West-Virginia benefit.

He's just a guy trying to survive in a state that Trump won by 40 points. There is nothing more than that. It is a figment of people's imaginations that it is. We just don't like it. In fact, the way we Democrats collectively feel about him has been engineered for the purpose of generating enough chaos to peel off some votes so that he can be more easily replaced with a Republican.

Think about this. We're to the point, where our dissatisfaction with Manchin is so intense, it makes the direct prospect of a Republican defeating him acceptable. We mistakenly believe that he's a Republican, even though his voting record is virtually 180 degrees opposite a Republican Senator. We're literally rooting for a Republican takeover of the Senate.

In the future, we'll be angry and spitting at the Josh Hawley-esqe Senator that replaces, while forgetting that we didn't fight hard enough to stop him/her.