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When I was in graduate school, I kinda fell in love with one of the more memorable sayings (there are many) from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. They note, with not a little bit of irony, that "nothing ever died of contradiction." The thrust is a soft criticism of the orthodox Marxists, who continued to believe that the contradictions of capitalism would ultimately force it to a crisis that would lead to revolution; there's a little bit of this thought remaining in some of our own leftists who argue that allowing the social catastrophe of capitalism to play itself out will lead to better social conditions, ultimately. The play, in any case, in one of my favorite slogans, was that logical contradiction is well and fine for the work of logic, but doesn't translate well to material conditions. Moreover, D&G argue throughout their work that capitalism in fact functions through the crises that it creates for itself: the various crises of capitalism merely indicate it reaching a limit that must be overcome, but that's how capitalism works (it's also why the system is disastrous for people) - capitalism is the only human built system that requires the very crises it creates for itself. It's still worthwhile, in any case, to look closely at what might be called real contradiction.
The McConnell proposals is a great example. The Republican Party is the party of the rich, and of finance capital. All its fundamental assumptions and real operations function to expand the power of what we used to call the ruling class, and finance capital - since the early 1970's - is the ruling class in Western democracies, and probably globally. At the same time, the GOP gets elected by whipping up populist fervor against government, and particularly against regulation and taxation (these are clearly the "ideas" of the ruling class) - largely through the mechanism of deficits, which allow them to link the everyday experience of the working class with the interests of the ruling class. The debt ceiling itself is actually just a bone to the populist rhetoric - you need to be at deficits at 15-20% of GDP before borrowing really becomes a problem, and 2011 is the last year where even negative projections put the deficit near those numbers). In this sense, the GOP smooths over the class contradictions inherent in their positions.
But this debt ceiling causes a real problem. The ruling class absolutely needs it raised (in truth, the ruling class doesn't care about deficits until they threaten bond payments, which is not at all the case for the current federal deficits as percentage of GDP, unless you have this false limit of the debt ceiling skewing the whole business). But the manner in which they've argued for themselves means that their populism absolutely prevents it from being raised. This is what the old Marxists used to call a real contradiction.
The McConnell proposal is the only possible solution from the standpoint of this contradiction, which is to say, from the GOP standpoint. Why? because it essentially allows the debt ceiling to be raised, and the GOP MUST raise the debt ceiling. It also allows the GOP to maintain its populist face against raising the debt ceiling by voting for these resolutions of disapproval, which will then be vetoed. The GOP's problem is this, a real contradiction: They MUST raise the debt ceiling, but they MUST NOT raise the debt ceiling. The proposal is the only way to resolve this contradiction in practice.
Of course, as we know, nothing ever died of contradiction...
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