Suicide Pact? It Depends

Roger Simon noted today that:

[T]he United States House of Representative voted to increase the national debt limit to $14,294,000,000,000 by a 217-212 vote. All the “ayes” were Democrats, even after the election of Scott Brown.

Simon likens the increase of the national debt limit to an act of mass political suicide by House Democrats:

What’s going on here? Was this a mass act of seppuku? Or perhaps they are lemmings, taking the plunge ensemble off some Alaskan cliff.

I disagree. Rather than blind, ideological suicide, the House Democrats who voted to increase the debt limit are betting the farm on a number of political assumptions. Democrat are assuming that Republicans will neither craft nor effectively articulate to their base and Independents a principled, fiscal response to 2009’s record fiscal profligacy. Decreasing military spending and reducing effectively dealing with unfunded entitlement programs are absolutely necessary. Both measures would be unpopular with the Republican base, which generally favored Bush’s expansion of government, Congressional authority (DOMA), and entitlements. Victor Hanson expounded on this idea earlier today:

It won’t be enough for conservatives to say they are not Obama, and not ready to become a socialist Belgium. They need far more — a systematic agenda that outlines exactly how Americans are to become fiscally solvent, what and how much should be cut, a vow to end the congressional culture of corruption and become Spartan in our congressional habits, a confident energy policy that encourages nuclear, natural gas, and oil drilling to tide us over to new sources of energies, and a new resolve to enforce our borders, and end the naïve posturing of treating our war against Islamic jihadism as some sort of interesting legal debate that bounces around the philosophy department lounge.

Democrats are further wagering that the Republican party cannot mobilize a sufficient number of Scott Brown-type candidates or candidacies in enough House (and Senate) districts to recapture either the House or the Senate. While Republicans, Independents, and Tea-Partiers alike may be optimistic about the Scott Brown effect, it remains far from certain. Moreover, as VDH notes, Democrats have a few more arrows in the quiver that may temper the Scott Brown effect:

[E]xpect a renewed “Bush did it” offensive, the promiscuous playing of the racial card to stifle dissent, and [yet unspent hundreds of billions of] stimulus money lavished on everyone from train aficionados to solar panel producers.

You’d think that the GOP might make an issue out of the fact that holding billions of “stimulus” dollars in reserve to spend in key districts in campaign years is literally (to use Biden’s favorite word) bribing us with our own money – an unacceptable form of political chicanery if there ever was one.  Yet, as Steve Sailer has pointed out, the GOP is generally incapable of mustering an offensive against Democrats. So Democrats have that going for them too.

November will tell whether the Democrats’ going all-in on an assumption of Republican incompetence will pay off. Then again, it appears that Washington is determined to continue redefining record fiscal profligacy. That’s gonna enhance the Scott Brown Effect, if the newly resurrected GOP can take a lesson.

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