Up to no good?: Unless the president is negotiating Kevin McCarthy’s terms of surrender, their talks over the debt ceiling will only result in political disaster for Democrats.(Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
Joe Biden has a divided mind when it comes to the Republican Party. On the one hand, he’s all too aware that the GOP has become radicalized and is an existential threat to American democracy. On the other, Biden, drawing on his many decades in Washington, is drawn to the idea of bipartisan compromise and acts as if it were his duty to elevate the more moderate wing of the Republican Party. We can see the two sides of Biden’s approach to the opposition party as he tries to navigate through the debt ceiling crisis. Biden has invoked the idea of taking the debt ceiling weapon off the table by invoking the 14th Amendment even as he has also indicated a willingness to cut a deal.
It’s unclear which side of the equation will win. To take up the issue of Biden’s handling of the GOP and the debt ceiling crisis, I spoke with Brian Beutler, editor in chief at Crooked Media. Brian edits a very fine newsletter, Big Tent, which can be found here.
Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.