Written by Thomas Martin Sobottke   

Whatever our feelings about the unnecessary wars overseas and the bloated defense budgets of the past decade, any nation must be able to defend and protect the welfare of its people. How we do that is what has been in contention for a long time. Now, the Tea Party Republican Caucus in the House has succeeded in placing the national security of the nation at risk and fully in play. Osama Bin Laden is dead, yet he is winning his greatest victory this week. The western world is poised on the brink of economic abyss, and it is the most conservative Republicans who have wailed for a decade about the war on terror, Muslims, and a strong defense who are most responsible.

Does Wall Street realize yet what it has to lose if their allies in the Congress destroy our economy come next Tuesday? Do most Americans? Any great power declines when the economic base that supports their military and diplomatic power erodes. That is what is happening now and more quickly due to the totally unnecessary and fatal coupling between raising the debt ceiling and more substantive long-term deficit reduction.

On Monday night, the President should have issued a proclamation via an executive order that declares that “as a necessary and fit war measure in time of war, and to ensure the national security of the United States of America” he was unilaterally breaking the impasse and raising the debt ceiling and asking that both sides return to the deficit reduction talks the following morning as usual with financial markets more stable and the nation protected. He would have buttressed his action with the 14th Amendment’s requirement that the good faith and credit of the United States always be maintained. He would remind the nation that he took an oath to see that “the laws of the United States be faithfully executed.”

No doubt he would be impeached in the House of Representatives by an over eager Republican majority, but that is now the customary procedure with Democrats serving in the White House. A Democratic majority in the Senate would protect him and the fight would be a badge of honor in the coming presidential campaign where daily the contrast between a haggling House trying to oust a President who has turned his attention to creating jobs and protecting Social Security and Medicare could be sharply drawn every single day for months.

What is so striking about this debt ceiling dance of economic mortality is that the Republican Party has abandoned the national security of the country and the strong economy that underpins even our peacetime and legitimate national defense. Where has that Cold War consensus on the national interest gone to? It is nowhere to be seen.

A Russian diplomat once quipped to American officials during the time of Kruschev that it would not be the United States that buries the Soviet Union but as the Soviet Premier had said “you will bury yourselves.”