The GOP's New Line: Defaults Don't Matter

Noah Kristula-Green makes the important point that Stanley Druckenmiller's weekend WSJ interview has blossomed in a matter of days into something like GOP orthodoxy. We've evolved in the space of a decade from "deficits don't matter" to "defaults don't matter."

It seems flabbergasting that a conservative party could arrive at this destination.

Yet the new mood exemplifies the trend we have seen over the past three decades, whereby one after another the "rules of the game" have been discarded as the two parties play politics ever more savagely.

The filibuster evolves from extraordinary procedure to routine super-major requirement.

Secret holds on presidential nominees proliferate.

And now even the debts and obligations of the United States become a tool of politics.

Everybody seems to assume that the rules will be reasserted before the game gets too dangerous. Maybe. Let's hope. But one year's outrageous innovation has a bad habit of becoming next year's new normal. Anything a Republican Congress can do to a Democratic president, a Democratic Congress can do to a Republican president. Americans like analogies to ancient Rome: a republic felled by overcentralized power. They owe it to themselves to study the Polish commonwealth: a republic wrecked by an irresponsible legislature.

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