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Peter Gerdes's avatar

As an aside, this is fundamentally the reason why parliamentary democracy is better. The incentives for obstruction to get your way are just too great in our system. The more polarized the public gets the worse the incentives because politicians pay a price for being the ones to blink with their base but pay little to no price from the base for refusing to compromise (it's the other side's fault for being unreasonable).

In a two party system there isn't any option for the moderates to get fed up with both sides productively so I fear for the future.

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Peter Gerdes's avatar

I think your argument is wrong in assuming the democrats could have passed a debt ceiling increase during the lame duck. Going back to articles from the time it seems like they didn't believe they could get Manchin and all 50 other Democratic Senate votes onboard ( https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/16/lame-duck-debt-ceiling-deal-00067123 ).

I expect that it's as simple as this. There was a good chance trying to raise the debt ceiling in the lame duck would fail (Manchin and the progressives would have irreconcilable demands) and thus trying to pass it then would only have made the Dems look bad and given up on other priorities. And if the Dems tried and failed to increase the limit it's harder to call the republicans names for refusing to raise it.

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