Stop blaming House Republicans for downgrade

It has been a month since the U.S. debt crisis reached its boiling point. With the threat of default and Moody’s Investors Service threatening to downgrade the U.S. AAA credit rating, the only hope Americans had was to sit by and wait for some sort of an agreement from Washington.

What came out was an agreement that did not satisfy either side and was a product of an embarrassing feud among our nation’s political elite.
In the end, it was not Moody’s,  but Stand & Poor’s that downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+.  

While I was disappointed by the actions of both sides during the debt debate, I have been most infuriated with how the Left has framed this issue since. They have seemed to place convenient blame on U.S. House Republicans for the S&P downgrade.

Quite frankly, I have been downright disgusted at the mudslinging and the accusations. The Left has framed Republicans as “political obstructionists,”  with Vice President Joe Biden even suggesting that some of the negotiators are political “terrorists.”

While I can respect the differing opinions of my friends across the aisle, they do really need to get their facts straight and stop using cheap political punch lines.  

For starters, in order to shed some light on this whole debt debacle, we must go back to the spring of 2010 in the 111th Congress.

During this time, Democrats had unified government with clear majorities in both chambers of Congress and President Barack Obama in the White House.

Under this unified government, Democrats, for the first time since modern budgeting began, failed to pass a budget by the April 15 statutory deadline.

Their failure to pass such a budget has directly impacted the federal fiscal year we are currently in, which ends on Sept. 30. The government has kept its doors open only because of a series of resolutions authorizing additional spending.  

This illustrates a serious internal Democrat struggle about spending and the debt long before Republicans took the majority of the House in January of this year.

To me, this inaction and failure of leadership to address such a challenge is a predecessor of what resulted in the hasty and reckless behavior we witnessed leading up to the debt deal.

The reckless behavior was undoubtedly fueled by the political paradigm shift with a new conservative Republican majority in the U.S. House.

This new majority was sent with a simple message from voters: a change in direction from the status quo is a must.

At the very least, the new majority has been able to shift the debate and has been successful in enacting reductions in federal spending.

Another point to acknowledge is the underlying motivation of the S&P downgrade.
S&P’s provided rationale was that the downgrade reflects a “view that the effectiveness, stability and predictability of American policy- making and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges.”  

While it seems the Left would make one believe that House Republicans are totally to blame for the downgrade, S&P’s Managing Director John Chambers clarified otherwise in an interview earlier last month.

When asked about whether or not it was a Republican downgrade, he said, “I think there’s lots of blame to go around. And what we need to come to in the United States is a way of forging consensus, so that we can make the tough choices that lie ahead, because the fiscal situation in the United States is not sustainable.”  

Tempers seem to have somewhat cooled with Congress out for its August recess. But the political finger pointing game must stop.

I am tired of the blame game, and I think it is about time that Senate Democrats and President Obama take some ownership of this problem and lead on it.

­— cjcaudil@indiana.edu