After a political crisis in the United States that lasted 16 days, the right wing of the Republican Party has been dealt a resounding public defeat. Both houses of Congress have voted to end the U.S. government shutdown by a large margin. Even the House of Representatives, which has a Republican majority, saw a defection by the center which supported the proposed bill. The final tally of the vote was 285 (including 78 Republican votes) in favor, versus 144 votes against. The Republicans entered a battle they could never have won. Their opposition to the healthcare plan known as Obamacare was futile, because the bill was passed by Congress in 2010 and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court last year. Nevertheless, the traditional leadership of the Republican Party could not rein in the amateurish extremists in its ranks such as the Tea Party or the new Senator Ted Cruz, who has only one agenda, namely, bolstering his position as a Republican presidential candidate in 2016. President Obama will not say in front of the television cameras that he won, because this will cause outrage. However, he does not need to go on a victory tour around the Capitol building with the residents of Washington D.C. applauding him, because the Republican Party has backed down now like it never did before, at least as far as I remember in decades of working in the press, including when I lived in the U.S. capital. The senior leaders of the Republican Party like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two hawkish warmongers, conceded their humiliating defeat. Now, they are looking for someone to blame for their loss, but those will not be quite scapegoats, because they have truly proven that they are adventurers and gamblers, not politicians. There are two important points about the solution, however: One, it is temporary; and two, it does not quite ward off the specter of a new financial crisis. The bill signed by President Obama stipulates that the government would receive funding up until January 15, 2014. In other words, it will cover only three months. Meanwhile, the debt ceiling deadline now expires in February 7, 2014, so I expect the confrontation to return after the Republicans learn their lessons and regroup for a showdown with the president on issues they can indeed win on, such as cutting government spending to rein in the growing public debt. The last figure I have on the U.S. debt is $17 trillion, and will probably now be higher after the recent crisis. The crisis will have aggravated the federal debt problem in the long term as well. While the solution to the crisis reinstated 450,000 government employees and allowed the administration to pay the salaries of 1.2 million government employees, the employees returned to work with automatic cuts (sequesters) taking effect in federal spending. This means that unemployment will increase rather than decrease. Furthermore, raising the debt ceiling will mean that the government will immediately print more dollars ($100 bills), but there is no reason to be optimistic that the economy will improve well enough to end borrowing from countries like China. China cried ‘foul,' when it became concerned that the U.S. government could default on its debt. In other words, there was a solution, but it was only temporary. Behind the entire crisis is a dispute that cannot be settled in Congress or in newspapers, between an extremist rightwing view that believes the United States is an ‘exceptional' country and the world's policeman – that is, giving the United States the right to intervene in other countries behind the UN's back – and another American faction that believes the United States cannot play this role. Indeed, George W. Bush's wars put the country on the brink of bankruptcy. The U.S.'s credit rating was also downgraded, meanwhile, and was almost downgraded again during the latest crisis. In such a situation, I find that the confrontation between Congress and the administration has been postponed not resolved. Next year will have barely begun when the crisis will return, in a new guise. But the problem is that if the United States sneezes, the whole world catches a cold. [email protected]
