LOSING THE ARGUMENT IS NOT REASON TO GIVE UP.

Our President lapses into irrelevance, and his enablers in the legacy press and among the self-styled progressives get ever more hysterical.  "[D]emagogues and dictators do love a vacuum."  Yes, and so do vanguardists.  But let's retain some perspective.

A longtime member of the country-club Republican establishment looks at the new face of his party and despairs.

A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

That's one view. I dissent.

The budget ceiling is a recognition, admittedly honored more in the breach than in the observance, that G - T = ΔM + ΔB isn't just for the economics journals, and that financial markets can discount the value of a public debt even if that debt is issued under a valid ceiling approved by the two houses and autographed by the President.

And if some Members of Congress perceive as among the reasons they were elected an obligation to respect the laws of conservation of economics, it is not holding the economy hostage to move public policy in a direction where those laws of conservation might ultimately be respected.  But as I read further into the despairing essay, I begin to understand why the epithet Republican In Name Only emerged.

The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

That's an interesting choice of illustrations, inasmuch as the Senate that produced Medicare, one of the unsustainable public policies contributing to the contingent liability that threatens large increases in ΔM + ΔB is a Senate in which the various civil rights legislation of that era was subject to filibuster, and in those days a cloture motion required 67 votes.  Consensus is just another word for the Eastern Liberal Establishment getting its way.