In the two posts below I’m providing a lot of analysis on the assumption that something like this deal gets finalized. That might not even happen. So keep that in mind. But if it does the big political questions that comes to mind is this: Does the House Freedom Caucus whine a bit, vote no on the deal and then move on to Hunter Biden, or do they get stuck on the fact that Biden and McCarthy essentially got together to sideline them and stiff them on most of their demands? The politics of the next two years turns a lot on the answer to that question.
A key for thinking about which path they go in is understanding the relative roles of dominance politics and policy in Freedom Caucus thinking. These folks don’t really care much about spending levels or policy. The Trump years make that clear. They care about gutting a Democratic President. To paraphrase Adam Serwer, the humiliation is the point.
Late Update: David Dayen has a much more pessimistic view of the potential deal in his X Date newsletter. But I note that on things like the duration of the caps he’s saying it could be anywhere between 2 and 6 years. The reports I’ve seen say 2. Anything’s possible since there’s no actual deal yet. I note that because the difference between two and six years would be vast as far as these caps go
