J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Republican Sen. Rick Scott has proposed dollar-for-dollar cuts in exchange for increasing the federal debt limit to meet the government’s obligations.
Republicans contend that allowing a majority of senators to pass policy measures would fundamentally change America. They would prefer we adhere to the traditional American values of refusing to pay debts that Congress has already obligated.
Mind you, this isn’t that old a tradition. For most of American history, Congress just authorized each individual instance of borrowing, and there weren’t that many. During World War I, the concept of a “debt limit” was established to deal with government borrowing in the aggregate. And every so often, that debt limit must be raised. That’s usually a perfunctory process, allowing some congressional grumbling about the burden being passed on to children and grandchildren, followed by a quick rise in the debt limit. The exception for this is whenever there’s been a Democratic president in office in the last 25 years.
When Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1995, he nullified the ingenious “Gephardt rule” that deemed the debt limit to be increased whenever a budget passed. This eventually led to the 1995 and 1996 government shutdowns, when Republicans refused to increase the limit because the president, through some historic mishap, was a Democrat. In 2011, a showdown over the debt ceiling during Barack Obama’s presidency led to the punishing Budget Control Act and ten subsequent years of austerity budgets.
By now, you might have heard that a Democrat is in the White House again, and so by the law of Republicanism, a debt limit crisis must necessarily ensue. The party that passed a couple trillion dollars in tax cuts for the rich and corporations four years ago is now deeply concerned about deficits, a turnabout that should surprise nobody. But in particular, they want to use the debt limit, which the Treasury Department is set to hit this year, to force massive spending cuts. The House reinstated its Gephardt rule, but the Senate’s ability to do so cannot get around the need to surmount the filibuster to pass a budget. So now we have two conflicting visions for the country: either a supermajority legislative apparatus that defaults on the nation’s payment obligations, or a majority-vote body that doesn’t.
The debt limit has actually been suspended since a 2019 agreement. But that expires July 31. Thanks to COVID measures, the U.S. is way over the limit put in place before the suspension. If need be, Treasury can engage in “extraordinary measures” to keep the nation under the limit. But by late summer or early fall, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, those measures will run out.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who not coincidentally is running the Senate Republican campaign arm for the 2022 cycle, is pitching dollar-for-dollar cuts for increasing the debt limit. But this would be much more aggressive than it sounds. Republicans got $2 trillion in cuts out of the 2011 debt limit brinkmanship, but thanks to COVID, we’re already something like $5 trillion over the current debt limit target. You’d have to build in more space to that for the usual array of annual borrowing, and therefore what Scott is proposing would amount to something like $7 trillion in cuts, which even if parceled out over ten years would amount to something close to cutting the entire non-defense discretionary budget, every year, for a decade. I don’t even think Scott feels like he can get that, but he most certainly wants to squeeze something out of the Democrats.
Keep in mind that the debt limit is not a limit on spending; it’s just a limit on the agreement to pay for spending already undertaken by Congress. If the federal government shut down today, closed all of its programs, mothballed the military, and left everyone on their own, we would still have debt obligations coming due after the July 31 expiration of the debt limit suspension. This is just political posturing over paying existing bills; of course, political posturing is about all Republicans are good at these days.
Scott’s bill is being pitched as “payback” for passing March’s emergency COVID relief measure. It wasn’t an issue for the first COVID relief package, which Republicans eagerly participated in to the tune of $3 trillion when Donald Trump held the White House. But the debt limit only becomes an issue during Democratic presidencies. The ideological principle at work here is that when there’s a Democratic president, the full faith and credit of the U.S. government must be taken hostage.
Everyone, including the Democrats, knows this. “Republicans clearly get religion on deficits and debt when they’re in the minority. They don’t give a crap about it when they’re running the place,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Politico. A spending-cut compromise akin to the Obama era is unlikely; both sides are entrenched. But foreknowledge of this deficit hustle is useless if Democrats don’t take the step within their power to end this hostage-taking, at least under unified government, by eliminating the filibuster.
There are a lot of reasons why Democratic holdouts simply don’t want to do that. One of the most unheralded is that it allows people like Joe Manchin to “support” bills he knows cannot pass without changing the rules. The filibuster is a powerful tool to limit small-d democratic accountability; the Manchins of the world can blame somebody else for the unresolved problems of the country by denying themselves the authority to fix them. It’s a way for Democrats to win interest-group praise while doing nothing of substance to upset their donors.
But the debt limit fight disrupts this. Yes, blame for the ensuing crisis can still be directed outward at Republicans. But the consequences, instead of not improving union laws or reducing health care costs, are a national debt default, something unthinkable and deeply damaging, especially when Democrats have the power to prevent it. They could end the filibuster, pass a bill to extend the debt limit suspension to January Forever, Two Thousand and Forever, and never encounter this problem again. The fiction of the filibuster sustaining bipartisanship crashes when one political party routinely threatens financial Armageddon as a political policy.
If Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and whoever else want to stand on some notion of principle and refuse to allow a majority to decide things in the U.S. Senate, they are the ones truly responsible for whatever transpires as a result of deciding to not honor long-standing debt obligations. Plenty of issues have been foregrounded as the stakes in the filibuster fight: You can have minority rule or voting rights, labor rights, or what have you. But it’s hard to defend preserving minority rule when the choice is between that and avoiding a pointless default.
