The Swamp: Eric Levitz

Learning to Love the Debt-Ceiling Crisis How Biden turned a political headache into a winning issue.

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HOUSE REPUBLICANS CAN'T do much with their tenuous grip on Congress's lower chamber. With a Democratic majority in the Senate and Joe Biden in the White House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy's caucus can't slash taxes on venture capitalists, purge school libraries of Toni Morrison novels, compel pregnant teens to give birth, or enact any of its other priorities. What the House GOP can do, however, is pick the terrain of partisan battle.

That is no small thing. Different issues favor different parties. On some policy questions, Democrats and Republicans must put the interests of their core constituencies above popular opinion. On others, they are free to pander to the intuitions of the politically fickle Rust Belt residents who will choose the next president. Picking the right fight gets you a long way toward winning it. With its control of the House, the GOP can force votes on any of the myriad subjects that split the Democratic Party internally and unite Republicans with swing voters.

Yet House Republicans have chosen to do the opposite. By effectively threatening to default on the national debt unless Biden slashes the federal deficit, McCarthy and his allies have teed up a fight over America's fiscal priorities that unites the Democratic Party with the median voter while isolating and fracturing the Republican coalition-a fight that looks likely to dominate Washington over the next weeks and months and to set the tone for the rest of Biden's first term.