POTUS has handy debt limit solution
“I want to look the president in the eye,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said the other day, “and [have him] tell me there’s not one dollar of wasteful spending in government.
“Who believes that? The American public doesn’t believe that.”
Of course, McCarthy, the Republican leader, is right. Even the most ardent, wild-eyed liberal would not dare to disagree.
Why then bring it up? It’s McCarthy’s way of edging into the debate over the lifting of the national debt ceiling. Come June, the U.S. Treasury says, the United States will confront the uncomfortable necessity of raising the debt ceiling or face defaulting on its loans and other financial obligations, up to and including Social Security payments, Medicare obligations, and veterans benefits and military pay.
Technically speaking, the current $31.4 trillion debt limit has already been breached. As a result, the Treasury is even now taking “extraordinary measures” to stave off the day of national, and international, financial reckoning.
There’s an easy enough way to ward off the impending crisis, and that is for the recalcitrant Republican-controlled House of Representatives to join willing Senate Democrats (and a good many Senate Republicans) in passing a measure lifting the ceiling on borrowing.
In the past, this has been done dozens of times without controversy. According to the Treasury, “since 1960, Congress had voted 78 times to permanently raise, temporarily extend, or revise the definition of the debt limit – 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democratic presidents.
“Congressional leaders of both parties have recognized that this is a necessity.”
When Donald Trump was in the White House, House Republicans hardly blinked an eye in carrying forward on the obligation to find a way to pay for the deficit spending they had authorized, including the wasteful Trump business tax cuts.
Under Trump, lifting the debt ceiling wasn’t a problem for Republicans.
With Joe Biden in the White House, House Republicans all of a sudden are whistling a different tune. This needs to be called out for what it is: rank hypocrisy and gross political partisanship.
Republicans seem intent on playing a game of chicken with the nation’s well-being and the international standing of the world’s strongest, most stable economy, all in the name of damaging Biden.
House Republicans should lift the debt ceiling, clean and simple, and then fight, if they must, the spending battle in the appropriate forum – in committee and on the House floor when programs and spending are hashed out.
Instead, House Republicans are like airline hijackers: give in to our demands, they say, or else. The “or else” unfortunately involves promises made to U.S. bondholders as well as to America’s elderly and infirm and to its uniformed defenders in harm’s way around the globe.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In 1979, Missouri Democrat Dick Gephardt offered a new, improved way of dealing with the debt limit; he proposed, and the parliamentarians in Congress agreed, that the debt ceiling would be effectively raised whenever Congress passed a new budget or budget resolution.
The “Gephardt rule” temporarily resolved the contradiction of voting for an appropriation but not voting to fund the appropriation.
Gephardt, who went on to became House speaker, told the Atlanta’s Joshua Green in 2011 that he asked members, “Did you vote for the appropriation bill? The defense bill? The highway bill? They’d all say yes. And I’d say, ‘Well, then you got to pay the bill. If you didn’t mean it, don’t vote for it. Then you won’t have to pay for it.”
For much of our history, debt limitation was not even on the books. The matter was initially raised in 1917 and then refined in 1939. Back then, and for many years to come, the debt ceiling was a purely budgetary issue, divorced from politics.
The post-Civil War 14th Amendment emphasizes this point by declaring, “The Public Debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” In 2011, former President Clinton urged Barack Obama to deploy the amendment solution. President Obama declined.
More than a few scholars have said the president has the legal authority to make sure the government never faces insolvency. It’s a point Biden should keep in mind. Come June, he, and the country, may need it.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.