Thelma and Louise and the Next House Speaker

TEAM: A SNEAK PEEK AT THE SPEAKER’S RACE AND WHAT’S REALLY AT STAKE. PLEASE SHARE WITH A FRIEND.

Who will House Republicans choose as their next Speaker?  Will that Speaker demand meaningful debt reduction as a condition of raising the debt limit?  These imminent decisions are ineluctably intertwined. 

Absent meaningful debt reduction, our republic is headed over a fiscal cliff that will make Thelma and Louise’s suicide plunge into the Grand Canyon look like a soft landing.  It is therefore imperative America’s next House Speaker have both the brains and backbone to roll back America’s fiscal crisis.

I’m not sanguine about success.  Fully 210 of 218 House Republicans voted to keep a Speaker who had openly collaborated with House Democrats and RINO Senators to pass a gaggle of Bidenomics spending bills.  This Uniparty fiscal orgy has ignited a virulent inflation, triggered a wage-price spiral, and resulted in the most rapid rise in interest and mortgage rates in decades.

With no small irony, the eight House Republicans who stood in the fiscal breach are being branded as extremists simply for pointing out what every American outside the House and Senate chambers knows: our fiscal position is untenable.

Today, our public debt stands at $33 trillion, and America’s debt-to-GDP ratio, which measures the ability of our economy to both provide public goods and services and still service the debt, is well north of 120%. 

Global financial markets scream danger when any country hits a debt-to-GDP ratio above 70%.  Yet, the Congressional Budget Office projects America’s debt-to-GDP ratio will rise to nearly 200% by 2053. 

As this debt-to-GDP ratio climbs, more and more tax revenues will go not to pay for our roads and bridges and education and national defense but simply to service the debt, much of which is held by Communist China. 

In this Alice in Bidenomics world, forget about the dollar being the reserve currency of the world.  Forget about single digit mortgage rates.  Forget about rising real wages.  Forget about having the capabilities to defend this nation against increasingly aggressive enemies ranging from Communist China and Russia to Iran, North Korea, and a lethal diaspora of stateless Islamic extremists.

Of course, on the way to hurtling over this fiscal cliff, there will be repeated partisan fights in Congress over whether to raise taxes or cut spending.  Resulting stalemates will, in turn, force the Treasury and Federal Reserve to option three: simply printing more money to accommodate the debt and thereby creating hyperinflation.  

During my White House years, I repeatedly dealt with House and Senate Republicans.  Nothing in that experience suggests any “come to fiscal Jesus” moment whereby Republicans will unite around using the debt limit deadline as the last remaining lever to get meaningful debt reduction. 

Yet, I also learned that if House Republicans are to agree on anything, they will need a concrete proposal to coalesce around.  One such three-pronged proposal may be gleaned from the fine work of former Trump OMB Director Russ Vought. 

Prong One claws back future spending streams from the profligate Bidenomics budget, which has baked more than $1 trillion a year of additional debt into our annual budget.  For starters, House Republicans must insist on the elimination of all projects in the so-called “infrastructure” bill that aren’t infrastructure at all.  That’s well over half the what’s funded in the bill.

House Republicans must also insist on a roll back of the Bidenomics electric vehicle mandate – which Candidate Trump has promised to do if elected president.  This mandate will neither sustainably boost the U.S. economy nor clean our air on net.  It will simply offshore electric vehicle production to the sweat shops and pollution havens of Communist China while destroying the U.S. auto industry.

Prong Two is based on the well-known Trumpian economic principle that the best way to balance the budget is to increase real economic growth – and thereby tax revenues.   This can only be done through structural adjustments that will reduce the rate of inflation and thereby reduce the level of interest rates which are now starting to strangle the U.S. economy.

At the top of this structural reform list is a return to Trumpian strategic energy dominance through a “drill, baby, drill” re-expansion of oil leasing and pipelines curtailed by Bidenomics.  Remember here that as oil prices have risen in Biden’s Green New World to levels some 50% higher than observed under Trump, food prices have also skyrocketed -- petroleum is a key ingredient of fertilizer and a key transportation cost for the food production and transportation supply chains.

Prong Three involves comprehensive entitlement and welfare reforms coupled with razor sharp cuts in the woke programs and personnel of our bureaucracy -- from Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the EPA to the now not just woke but weaponized DOJ, IRS, and FBI.  At least $7 trillion of savings are available in this prong alone without cutbacks to social security or Medicare.  

Whichever candidate for Speaker can best implement this three-pronged approach should be the one House Republicans elect.  The best choice – but least likely to be chosen – is any one of the eight principled Republicans who opposed McCarthy, including Matt Gaetz who is emerging as the Newt Gingrich of our times.

With Steve Scalise in the running but too close to the old McCarthy Guard, the default option may be Jim Jordan, who has Trump’s support.  For this to work, however, Brother Jim needs to channel the combative Jordan of old who I loved to banter with in the days of traveling on Air Force One.  That was a true warrior; but the last time I saw the face of the old Jim Jordan was back in 2021 on a milk carton.