J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, joined from left by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, updates reporters on Democratic efforts to pass President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, September 23, 2021, at the Capitol.
Congress appears headed for a multi-bill pileup, a collision whose earthshaking consequences threaten to eclipse the cosmos-revealing smashing of particles in the Large Hadron Collider. Democrats have bundled together the bill that will fund the government’s operations after current funds run out at the end of the week with the bill that raises the government’s debt limit, which enables it to keep paying its creditors, bondholders, and such. Unless the limit is raised, the government will start defaulting on its obligations in the first week of October.
McConnellized Republicans oppose this legislation, hoping to pin on the Democrats (who could enact this bill by themselves by bundling it into their only-takes-50+1-votes reconciliation package) the label of big spenders for raising the debt limit. For their part, Democrats intend to bring up the government-funding-debt-paying bill as a freestanding piece of legislation, outside of the reconciliation process, thereby compelling the nay-saying Republicans to, in effect, force the shutdown of the government and induce a financial panic. Once the Dow drops 10,000 or so points and unemployment skyrockets, the Democrats’ thinking goes, the GOP will sheepishly agree to these measures, but great political damage will have been done to them.
However …
Either once this occurs, or even before, what would happen if the Democrats did bundle funding the government and raising the debt ceiling into the reconciliation bill? How would that affect the votes of the Manchin-Sinema-Gottheimer gang on reconciliation? Would these self-described fiscal conservatives say that they’re so deeply opposed to funding child care that they’re willing to have the government default on its debts? Would the Wall Street lobbyists now hard at work endeavoring to persuade Manchinesque Democrats to kill the reconciliation bill because it raises their clients’ and their own taxes still oppose that bill if it also includes the only path to forestalling an unprecedented financial panic and, possibly, meltdown?
Seems to me this could be the ace in the Democrats’ hole. They should play it.
