Republicans like to tell stores about being “fiscal conservatives” who oppose irresponsible spending. They’ve managed in the process to impede economic growth while successfully fighting off efforts to cut that large segment of our irresponsible spending which takes the form of subsidies to highly profitable industries like Big Oil, Big Agriculture, and big what-have-you – which big entities often happen, in turn, to be very generous when it comes time to fund political campaigns.  

Nowhere, though does GOP hypocrisy show through more than in the recent budget and debt level negotiations. The Washington Post‘s Wonkblog today identifies the members of the exclusively Republican “default caucus,” made up of the 135 representatives and 17 senators who voted first for the omnibus spending bill, and then against raising the debt limit that would pay for it. They essentially decided that the United States should not pay the bills that they themselves had voted to run up. Try doing that at home, Mr. and Mrs. Average American. As Wonkblog’s Christopher Ingraham puts it, “the fact a significant faction in Congress can vote to run up debt, refuse to pay for it, and bill themselves as “fiscal conservatives” shows just how much that term has lost its meaning.”

I would suggest that a better label than “default caucus” for these lawmakers would be “deadbeat caucus.” That, after all, is what we call folks who don’t want to pay their bills. There are several members of the deadbeat caucus from Missouri:

Senator Roy Blunt (R)

Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2)

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-3)

Rep. Vickky Hartzler (R-4)

Rep. Sam Graves (R-6)

You can click on the names of Representatives listed above that have links to go to their press releases designed to tell us why voting for the spending bill they later refused to fund was such a good idea – not that they mention anything about the relationship between the two votes. I think that they hope we won’t figure that one out. Sam Graves simply ignores his yea vote on the omnibus funding bill, but did issue a statement patting himself on the back for voting against the extension of the debt limit. His reason for the nay note? He somehow seems to think that the debt limit extension vote is the place to cut the spending he approved in the earlier vote. So what do  you think? Are they all dumb as posts? Or cynical panderers? Whatever else they are, they’re certainly willing to play fast and loose with the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government – along with our welfare.

Ingraham allows as how those folks who voted against both the spending bill and the debt limit hike necessary to accommodate it should at least be admired for their consistency. And they are consistent, but you might temper your admiration when you remember that it stems from a totally nutty and discredited conception of economics, to wit, austerian theories that these folks probably don’t even understand apart from platitudes abut the “free market” and the evils of “big government.” Nothing but extreme economic ignorance coupled with total irresponsibility could explain their willingness to risk the disastrous consequences of default on the debt. Consequently, in recognition of the harm they do to us all, I’d like to label these folks the “nutjob caucus.” (You’re probably all aware that many members of the deadbeat caucus are, on other occasions, only too happy to claim membership in the nutjob caucus.) In Missouri, the members of the budgetary nutjob caucus includes:

Rep. Billy Long (R-7)

Re. Jason Smith (R-8)

So what do we call congresspeople who swallowed some of the bitter pills in the omnibus bill (cuts to food stamps, anyone?) in the interest of breaking gridlock and staving off another expensive government shutdown, and then, like responsible adults, voted to extend the debt limit to pay for the spending they had just authorized? Real legislators – you know, the people who are doing the hard job of governing without temper  tantrums. And it also looks like this time around we call them Democrats – including Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, who didn’t vote on the omnibus spending bill for whatever reason – maybe a few of those bitter pills were just too bitter – but came through when it was time to raise the debt limit and honor the spending decisions that his colleagues, including many in the GOP delegation, had already made.  

The clock is ticking:

Reign Of Morons: Apotheosis

By Charles P. Pierce at 7:45AM

….That is the state to which the whole thing has devolved. The denizens of the monkeyhouse are bringing the world economy to the brink of chaos in order to fk their own staffs over on health insurance. Or at least that’s what they say. In reality, what  this is about is a rump faction of one of our two major political parties that doesn’t think we should have a federal government at all, that wants to roll back its functions to a state half-past the Articles of Confederation, and that is doing so while believing itself to be some unholy combination of the Founding Fathers and the X-Men. They have cast themselves in their own action adventure movie, and the rest of us serve pretty much the same function as New York City does in The Avengers. We’re the set decoration that gets demolished as Our Heroes fight evil. These are pathetic, worthless children, playing dress-up, and smashing things because they like the sound of things breaking….

Senator Claire McCaskill (D), via Twitter:

Claire McCaskill ‏@clairecmc

Sending our country over a fiscal cliff is not conservative. It is reckless and irresponsible. 6:55 AM – 16 Oct 13

Uh, you can’t negotiate compromise with children who are playing dress-up and smashing things because they like the sound of things breaking.

Cue the asteroid.

Seems like Standard & Poors has amplified what it meant by the “political dysfunction” that led it to downgrade the U.S. bond rating from AAA to AA status. From the beginning S&P was pretty specific that much of the problem was the GOP speech impediment that prohibits the use of the words “revenue” or “taxes.” Today, a S&P spokesperson added:

[P]eople in the political arena were even talking about a potential default,” said Joydeep Mukherji, senior directior at S&P. “That a country even has such voices, albeit a minority, is something notable,” he added. “This kind of rhetoric is not common amongst AAA sovereigns.

In other words, all that blather about how default would be no big thing spooked the ratings agency – which, in turn, seems to have spooked the stock market. With this in mind, I ask you to stroll down memory lane and take a look at what some of Missouri’s GOP political leaders were saying at the height of the furor.

Todd Akin (R-2) wagged his metaphorical finger in our faces and declared that default “would shock us as a nation into saying that we really have to deal with this problem,” and “experience what it is like to live within our means.”  I guess we now know that it wouldn’t have been that spiffy after all, but at least Akin got part of his wish. He and his buddies did manage to inflict some wounds on our financial well-being.

Billy Long, that profound financial prognosticator, dismissed the whole issue of default as so much ado about nothing:

Let the date come and go, … That’s going to be on the president,” Long said. “There is money there. He can pay what he wants to pay, and if he doesn’t pay, that’s his bluff.

Based on this tweet, which Michael Bersin has dissected here at SMP, one has to believe that Vicky Hartzler just didn’t read S&P’s statement about why they downgraded the our bond rating or that she missed the good parts:

S&P’s decision to downgrade our credit rating is no surprise: the debt ceiling package wasn’t big enough–one reason I voted ‘no’.

Now what I want to know is who among these folks will conveniently forget what he or she said about default and/or the causes of the S&P downgrade, and who will keep on pretending that S&P has validated the GOP narrative à la Vicky Hartzler?

ADDENDUM:  In regard to the those who welcomed default (via Steve Benen):

A senior administration official said those who simply choose not to believe any of the warnings, “These are the kinds of people who get eaten by bears.

Eaten by bears? We should be so lucky. Here in Missouri we send them to Washington D.C. to make laws.