White House timidity on the debt ceiling is infuriating. What is it afraid of?
O ne wonders what the Biden administration is afraid of when it comes to calling the Republicans’s bluff on raising the federal debt ceiling. While White House officials no doubt have genuine legal and policy concerns about their ability to act unilaterally to defuse the crisis, the overriding reason is likely fear of the political consequences, and on that front they are both misreading the moment and misunderstanding the composition of the country’s electorate.
To quickly recap, Congress passes laws to “promote the general welfare” of the public, and those laws usually cost money. Not infrequently, the cost of those laws exceeds the amount of money the government has in the bank, so they have to borrow money to pay the bills. But because of an obscure 1917 law, the amount of loans the government can take out to pay its bills is capped at a set (and, frankly, relatively arbitrary) amount. When this happens, Congress must raise the limit of how much money can be borrowed to meet the country’s obligations.
When a Republican is in the White House, this basic duty happens without any drama or fanfare. The limit gets raised, the bills get paid, and life goes on. But after Barack Obama was elected president, “burn it down” Republicans have taken to using the need to raise the debt limit as an opportunity to hold the government hostage and demand draconian cuts in spending programs – previously congressionally-approved spending programs, mind you – in exchange for increasing the authority to borrow more money. Despite near-universal agreement that the economic shock and turmoil of defaulting on the debt would be catastrophic, the Republicans don’t care and use the potential economic crisis to pursue their destructive agenda.
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