.Wed Oct 16, 2013 at 06:09 AM PDT. Congress is the most present danger in the world to the national security of the United States. by David Harris GershonFollow . Email128 Comments / 128 New.Benjamin Wittes has written a scathing piece at his national security site entitled, The Debt Ceiling as a National Security Issue. In it, he makes the case that Congress is more of a threat to U.S. national security than Al Qaeda, Iran and North Korea. Its a similar argument I made recently, in which I characterized House Tea Party members willingness to leverage damage to the U.S. as political terrorism and jihadism. Heres Wittes (with emphasis mine): If a body other than the Congress of the United States were actively contemplating a step that would, by the accounts of virtually all economists, tank the U.S. economy, cause interest rates to shoot up, and trigger a financial crisis, we would talk about that body as threat to national security. [...] Yet for some reason, when Congress flirts with flushing this asset down the toilet, with giving it away for no discernible reason and getting nothing in exchange for it, we do not tend to discuss this in national security terms. Congress may suffer in public opinion polls, as it has done. But we don’t tend to talk about Congress as—at this stage—what it plainly is: the clearest and most present danger in the world to the national security of the United States. There is no chance that tomorrow Al Qaeda will cause this country to default on its debt. Nor is there any chance that Iran will or that North Korea will or that any foreign adversary will. Nor can any of these entities hope to inflict one gazillionth of the damage such an event would entail. There is, however, a considerable chance that Congress will launch such an attack—which, of course, we won’t speak of in those terms.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 20:38:30 +0000
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