Counterfactual of the day: President McCain's afternoon siesta

counterfactual, noun, a conditional statement the first clause of which expresses something contrary to fact

Counterfactual of the day: would Tea Partiers and Republicans be screaming about deficits, the national debt, and the debt ceiling if President McCain was taking his afternoon siesta in the West Wing?  Shh, he’s napping.

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Ezra Klein’s interview with Stan Collender about the ideological discipline of the Tea Party goes to the heart of my post on the Tea Party, federal budgeting, and the debt ceiling.  Republican lawmakers are scared to death of the consequences of crossing the Tea Party leadership, and maybe rightly so.

The notion that there will be no consequences to a breached debt ceiling is wishful thinking at best and willful mendacity at worst.  Members of Congress swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, even the parts they don’t like.  For people who claim the Constitution as their guiding principle, destroying the full faith and credit* of the United States Government feels a lot more treasonous than patriotic.

*It turns out that most everyone is using the phrase “full faith and credit” wrong.  In the Constitution, it actually has to do with the applicability of judicial rulings among the many levels and jurisdictions of American courts.  It has nothing to do with the national debt, which is explicitly addressed by Article 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Shame on you, Pat Toomey.  As a Tea Party-backed member of Congress, you should know your Constitution backwards and forwards.