It’s one of the more comical aspects of the deadly serious game of chicken that House Republicans are playing on the debt limit, but it’s worth pointing out, as I did at New York:
As the United States lurches toward a possible debt default thanks to House Republican hostage-taking on legislation needed to extend or suspend the debt limit, it’s increasingly evident that (as my colleague Jonathan Chait observed) the hostage-taker is strangely reluctant to name a ransom. Indeed, the initial Democratic strategy in this complicated chess game was simply to force House Republicans to say exactly what kind of spending cuts they propose to make in exchange for allowing a debt-limit measure to wobble its way to Joe Biden’s desk.
It’s easy to mock GOP lawmakers for the brainlessness, or maybe cowardice, of their effort to make Democrats identify the spending cuts their opponents want. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell tans the elephant’s hide with considerable panache:
“Republicans have Very Serious budget demands. Unfortunately, they can’t identify what any of those demands are.
“They say they want to reduce deficits — but meanwhile have ruled out virtually every path for doing so (cuts to defense, cuts to entitlements, wiping out nondefense discretionary spending, or raising taxes). …
“Republicans say they want lower deficits — in fact, they have pledged to balance the budget (that is, no deficit at all) within seven or 10 years. But they have not laid out any plausible mathematical path for arriving at that destination. They promise to cut ‘wasteful spending’ … but can’t agree on what counts as ‘waste.’”
In so quickly reaching this predictable dead end in answering the world’s easiest math problem, Republicans have one plausible line of defense: It’s how much of the public feels about fiscal matters as well. They really don’t like deficits and (especially) debt. But they really don’t like the kind of spending cuts that Republicans are talking about either (tax increases, of course, are categorically off the table for the GOP and have been since the George H.W. Bush “Read my lips: No new taxes” debacle).
A September 2022 poll from the deficit scolds of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation found that Americans are up in arms about all the borrowing:
“A 31-month high of 83% of voters are urging the president and Congress to spend more time addressing the national debt, with the biggest jump among those under age 35 (8 points to 85%).
“More than eight-in-ten voters (81%) also said that their concern about the national debt has increased. Nearly three-in-four voters (74%) feel the national debt should be a top-three priority for the president and Congress, including 65% of Democrats, 74% of independents, and 86% of Republicans.”
From 40,000 feet, all that red ink looks pretty alarming, it seems. More recently, this very week, the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal found a majority of Americans stamping their feet about it:
“Most Americans oppose raising the federal debt ceiling without accompanying cuts to federal spending, a new RMG Research poll finds.
“Sixty-one percent of 1,000 registered voters in the survey said Congress should either raise the debt ceiling with spending cuts (45%) or refuse to raise the ceiling at all (16%). Only about a quarter (24%) said Congress should raise the ceiling without accompanying spending cuts.”
To House Republicans, the great symbol of runaway spending is the “monstrous” $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in December. Many of them claimed during the fight over Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership bid that “the American people” were outraged by the measure despite the fact that it cleared the Senate, House, and White House. Perhaps they were thinking of a Twitter poll conducted by Elon Musk that showed that 75 percent of respondents opposed the omnibus bill.
The sad truth is, however, that the more specific you are in identifying items in one of those “monstrous” bills, the more support they command from the public. In 2021, Gallup published a summary of public-opinion research on what was then a $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Democratic budget-reconciliation proposal (soon whittled way down to $2.2 trillion and then to a net-negative figure in the ultimately enacted Inflation Reduction Act) and found that its provisions were very popular despite the debt they required:
“[S]everal recent polls … ask about the bill in a broad, umbrella fashion, and all find majority support. A Quinnipiac poll conducted July 27-Aug. 2 asked, ‘Do you support or oppose a $3.5 trillion spending bill on social programs such as child care, education, family tax breaks and expanding Medicare for seniors?’ and found 62% support, 32% opposition. A Monmouth University poll conducted July 21-26 asked about both the initial infrastructure bill and the new $3.5 trillion bill, describing the latter this way: ‘A plan to expand access to healthcare and child care, and provide paid leave and college tuition support.’ The results were similar to the Quinnipiac poll, with 63% in favor and 35% opposed …
“A progressive think tank, Data for Progress, conducted an online poll among likely voters July 30-Aug. 2, with a much more detailed 130-word description of the bill, including in the question wording a bulleted list of six specific proposals in the plan, the $3.5 trillion price tag and even a description of the ‘reconciliation’ procedure necessary to pass it. All of this (and the online mode, and the sample of likely voters as opposed to national adults) also didn’t seem to make much difference; 66% of likely voters in their sample supported the plan as described, while 26% opposed it — similar to the Quinnipiac and Monmouth results.”
So the minute you get into the particulars of Democratic-proposed spending bills, public concerns about debts and deficits tend to fade. And oh — there’s another problem for Republicans on the fiscal front: voters like the idea of higher taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to pay for popular spending measures.
The lesson for Republicans is clear: Their crusade for fiscal discipline is popular, so long as it is very general and you exclude higher taxes on the rich as a possible solution. No wonder politicians like McCarthy want Democrats to be the ones who name the GOP’s price for letting the U.S. economy get through the year without calamity.
I think we can safely assume that Fred D. Thompson first attended a Churches of Christ congregation, not the United Church of Christ.
A few facts bear this out. According to his official Congressional biography Thompson, though born in Sheffield, AL, attended public schools in Lawrenceburg, TN. Since he took his undergraduate degree from Memphis State University in 1964, we may assume his Lawrenceburg public schooling stretched from approximately 1948-1960. These dates are significant, since the UCC was not formed until 1957 (as a merger of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church) according to the UCC’s web site. Also according to the UCC, even today there are no UCC congregations in or around Lawrenceburg, TN. (The nearest is 36 miles distant in Athens, AL with their nearest concentration being 7 congregations in the Nashville, TN area, about 65 miles to the north.)
Lawrenceburg, TN, however, boasts no fewer than 9 of the loosely associated Churches of Christ in its city of only 14,000 and immediate environs. As a native of middle TN and as one unfortunately raised in the primitive, strictly fundamentalist CoC, this writer can attest to that region being a locus of great CoC concentration. From the odd perspective of the CoC, indeed, middle TN is the vertitable “Buckle of the Bible Belt”.
It is without a doubt, then, that Thompson was inured in the CoC traditions of biblical literalism and dogmatic separatism that marks their congregations. But, it is unsurprising that a subsequent marriage was held in a UCC. One imagines that Thompson’s 2nd wife had much to do with that choice, as well as whatever church Thompson may have attended at that time.
As a Vanderbilt Law graduate, practicing attorney, politician, and actor, Thompson had to adopt a moral relativism so necessary to the acquital of any of those professions. Such moral relativism is anathema to the dogma of the CoCs, but would be better tolerated by the much more liberal UCC. It seems Thompson had a conversion of convience somewhere along the way. As one of much more complete rejection of CoC dogma, this writer thoroughly empathizes.
However, one must wonder what precepts of fundamentalist Christianity were deeply set in the formative psyche of the young Thompson. How did it inform his conservatism. In a recent conversation with this author’s father, a long-time CoC minister, the widely-held belief in the infallibility of GWB and the rightness of his war among the CoC faithful were discussed. Even in the light of all evidence and the reported attrocities in Iraq, it seems this is one group that is still solid in its unwavering support of GWB. (The effects of a requirement of unquestioning obedience to authority in the church and to the scriptures and their impact on the reaction–particularly of the poorly educated and working class in America–to governmental and business authority structures would make for a fascinating study.)
So, we are right to question the religious training of Fred Thompson–as well as his seeming willingness to “flip-flop”, as it were, his religious affiliations. And on a final cautionary note, we should not forget the last unequivocal CoC member momentarily to pull his head from, er, the sand: Kenneth Starr!