Treasury Resorts to “Extraordinary Measures” as U.S. Hits Debt Ceiling

The Treasury is having to resort to “extraordinary measures” to prevent the United States from defaulting on its debt, which could plummet the country into a recession, Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress Thursday.

In a letter, Yellen explained the U.S. has reached its $31.4 trillion debt limit, forcing her to take steps to ensure the government does not default and has a little more time to solve the problem. For now, those “extraordinary measures” include redeeming and suspending new federal investments in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund. In a letter last week, Yellen also expected that the Treasury will suspend reinvestment of the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan.

Suspending investment in these funds will preserve the country’s credit until June, but Yellen noted that the amount of time these measures will work is “subject to considerable uncertainty” and urged Congress to act quickly.

She warned last week that defaulting would cause “irreparable harm to the U.S. economy.”

The debt ceiling is the maximum amount of money the U.S. can borrow. The current level was set two years ago. If the government reaches its borrowing limit, it could default on its debt or fail to make a payment. Already high prices and inflation could skyrocket, sending the U.S. into a recession.

House Republicans, who hold the majority in the chamber, refuse to raise the debt ceiling and instead are trying to slash spending in other areas, such as entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare. But Democrats and President Joe Biden refuse to negotiate, with White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre warning Wednesday that the debt limit should not be used as a “political football.”

Defaulting means the government would be unable to pay military salaries and Social Security benefits. A lower debt ceiling would also mean less funding for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, SNAP or food stamps, and meal programs for low-income students.

During the last debt ceiling standoff in 2021, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, warned that defaulting would send the U.S. into an almost immediate recession, wiping out up to $15 trillion in household wealth and nearly doubling the unemployment rate from about 5 percent at the time to about 9 percent.

“This economic scenario is cataclysmic.… The downturn would be comparable to that suffered during the financial crisis” of 2008, Zandi and Bernard Yaros, Moody’s assistant director and economist, said in a report.

George Santos has lied about most of his background, including that his grandparents fled the Holocaust, that his employees died at the Pulse nightclub shooting, and that he was a star volleyball player at a school he didn’t attend.

But this week brought another array of revelations about Santos’s past. First, there was the report that he used his fake animal charity to raise money for a homeless veteran’s dying dog, before stealing the money. Then newly uncovered immigration records showed that Santos’s mother, who Santos had repeatedly implied died from 9/11-related afflictions, was not in the United States at all that day.

And finally, another new piece of information came from old photos circa 2008 in Brazil, showing Santos adorned in drag, under the moniker Kitara Ravache, grinning alongside Brazilian drag queen Eula Rochard.

On Thursday, Santos denied stealing money from a dying dog and that he performed in drag, but notably ignored reports that he lied about 9/11.

Santos/Devolder/Zabrovsky/Ravache’s tweets are among the few public statements he has made in direct response to the endless stream of revelations and questions about his past.

The volume of new information about Santos’s background is continually shocking. Similarly interesting is what revelations seem to bother Santos and which ones he is trying to let slip through the public’s consciousness, simply by sheer will of the lies being so insurmountable, so untrackable, that it’s hard to maintain meaningful scrutiny on him.

Based on the little time Santos has actually spent denying most of the charges against him, perhaps he understands his party to be willing to overlook lies about 9/11 and the Holocaust, but not the rest.

Donald Trump mistook the woman accusing him of rape for his ex-wife in a photograph during a deposition last year, contradicting one of his weakest but most-used arguments for his innocence.

Popular writer E. Jean Carroll is suing Trump for defamation and sexual assault. Trump has rejected the rape allegation, repeatedly saying that he never knew Carroll and that she is not his “type.”

Since Carroll accused Trump of assault, a photograph has been widely circulated and cited as proof that the two had met before. Taken in 1987, the picture shows Trump, Carroll, and their respective spouses, at the time Marla Maples and John Johnson, talking at a party. In an excerpt of Trump’s 2022 deposition, parts of which were unsealed Wednesday, Trump mistakes Carroll for Maples.*

Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba is quick to correct him, but only after Trump repeatedly insists that Carroll is Maples. The fact that he can’t differentiate between Carroll, a woman to whom he said he wasn’t attracted, and Maples, a woman to whom he definitely was, undermines Trump’s main case for his innocence.

In another unsealed excerpt of the deposition, given in October, Trump appallingly claimed that Carroll “loved” the assault.

“She said it was very sexy to be raped,” he said. He also repeatedly said Carroll was mentally ill.

Carroll accused Trump in her memoir, released in 2019, of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She has sued him twice for allegedly defaming her, first in 2019 when he said she made up the rape allegation in order to sell her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media.

She is not the only one: At least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual harassment or assault since the 1970s, all of which he was denied, and he bragged in a 2005 recording of the show Access Hollywood about grabbing women’s genitals and kissing them without their consent. So far, Carroll’s case has gotten the most national attention and is one of the few to actually reach a courtroom. Trump is expected to go on trial in April.

Sexual assault is about power, not desire, and Psychology Today notes the “motivation stems from the perpetrator’s need for dominance and control.” Trump has made clear the lengths he will go to for power, from trying to bully Ukraine into digging up dirt on his political rival to lying about the 2020 election being stolen and so much more.

* This article originally misstated the year of Trump’s deposition.

Kevin McCarthy owes his long-desired speakership to a group of 21 holdouts finally caving, all of whom have been rewarded for flipping with plum committee assignments.

McCarthy made no secret of his ambition to be speaker, apparently no matter the cost, and the California Republican made us all sit through 15 agonizing votes before finally making enough deals to win. But it seems that the many changes to the rules package were not the only concessions he made.

Representative Lauren Boebert kept her seat on the Committee on Natural Resources and received a new post on the powerful House Oversight Committee. She is joined there by Scott Perry, Anna Paulina Luna, and Paul Gosar. Gosar was previously stripped of all committee assignments after he shared an animated video showing him killing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden with swords.

Andy Biggs and Matt Gaetz who, along with Boebert, were some of the most vocal McCarthy critics, will keep their seats on the House Judiciary Committee, along with Chip Roy and Dan Bishop. Byron Donalds, who at one point ran against McCarthy for speaker, will stay on the House Oversight Committee and has joined the House Committee on Financial Services. Many other McCarthy holdouts will keep their committee assignments.

McCarthy also rewarded his allies: Jim Jordan, who consistently voted for McCarthy even when the holdouts nominated Jordan for speaker, is the new chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Marjorie Taylor Greene spent months allying herself with McCarthy and urging her colleagues to back him. She, like Gosar, was stripped of committee assignments by Democrats for her inflammatory social media posts. Greene now sits on the Oversight Committee and the Committee on Homeland Security. Problematic king George Santos voted for McCarthy every time, and not only has the new speaker refrained from condemning the freshman congressman’s many lies but McCarthy also gave him two committee assignments.

James Comer is the new chair of the Oversight Committee. Mike Rogers threatened to withhold committee assignments from the holdouts and even nearly came to blows with Gaetz for refusing to vote for McCarthy. He now chairs the Armed Services Committee.

The White House slammed the assignments, with spokesman Ian Sams telling Axios, “It appears that House Republicans may be setting the stage for divorced-from-reality political stunts, instead of engaging in bipartisan work on behalf of the American people.”

“Republicans are handing the keys of oversight to the most extreme MAGA members of the Republican caucus who promote violent rhetoric and dangerous conspiracy theories,” he said.

Ritchie Torres, former vice chair of the Homeland Security Committee, tweeted he was “horrified” by Greene’s assignment to the group.

George Santos has positioned himself as a proud, unabashed conservative—on social issues and all. He has expressed support for Florida’s regressive “Don’t Say Gay” law that bars teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in school. Accusing Democrats of wanting to “groom our kids,” Santos peddled right-wing talking points that equate discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with children with sexual abuse. Such talking points often go further, holding that drag shows, or even LGBTQ people generally, groom and abuse children.

It now appears Santos has participated in drag himself.

A 2008 photo from Brazil depicts Santos, known at the time as Anthony, in a drag costume under the moniker Kitara Ravache.

The photo comes from Santos’s old friend Eula Rochard, a Brazilian drag queen who spoke with journalist Marisa Kabas. According to their conversation, Rochard met Santos when he was a teenager, and they bonded over both being gay and enjoying drag. After Rochard had seen a news story about Santos, Rochard shared the photo to her social media to prove the old connection.

“Me with the American Republican deputy at the Niterói parade, as I had said he wouldn’t leave my house, there’s the proof for those who called me a liar,” Rochard wrote on Instagram (in rough translation from Portuguese).

To be clear, it’s great that Santos enjoyed drag and made a friend while doing it. And in any abstract sense, it doesn’t matter! What matters is that Santos has positioned himself among a political movement incredibly antagonistic toward drag queens and others who enjoy drag, one that stokes transphobia and hate toward all LGTBQ people. Santos will try to have it both ways—and Republicans who have decried drag as a moral crisis will too: Either drag truly is an existential threat to our children (wrong) and Santos should be removed from Congress (correct), or drag is absolutely fine (correct) and Santos should not be removed from Congress (wrong).