• The most important people in Washington during the upcoming debt ceiling crisis will be the House Republicans closest to the political center, known as the “moderates”.
• The Republican Main Street Partnership, a political organization founded 25 years ago by then-Representative Amo Houghton of New York, has rebranded itself to stay relevant in today’s GOP, dropping the words “moderate” and “centrist” from its mission statement.
• The Main Street Caucus, the largest of the three groups of self-identified “pragmatists”, elected a more conservative chair and vice chair.
• The “pragmatists” have already blocked two bills backed by some on the far right from coming up for a vote.
• The “pragmatists” could use a discharge petition to bypass the party leadership in the fiscal battles to come, but many of them are sounding like McCarthy, who has said the president must endorse spending cuts in order to lift the borrowing limit.
• Former Representative Charlie Dent predicted that Republicans would win few if any concessions from Democrats for raising the borrowing limit this time around.
Published January 27, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Russell Berman’s original post ‘We Used to Be Called Moderate. We Are Not Moderate.’