In early March, the Biden administration issued a 2024 budget that forthrightly declared how it planned to reduce the deficit: With $5 trillion in tax increases on the rich and on large corporations over the next decade. It would spend more money on health care for the poor and uninsured, child care, Pell grants and free community college, climate resilience, the military and alliances like NATO. The White House proposal hasn’t a chance, of course, as long as Republicans control the House, but at least it represented a clear statement of principles and priorities, unlike the mush trickling out of the G.O.P. caucus.
To mask his chamber’s dysfunction, Mr. McCarthy issued a letter on Tuesday that tried to put the blame on Mr. Biden. The speaker accused the president of being “completely missing in action” on debt ceiling negotiation and said he remained willing to talk about raising the ceiling in exchange for cuts like reducing “excessive” nondefense spending (no details) and strengthening work requirements for unspecified federal benefits. (He undoubtedly meant Medicaid and food stamps, but he didn’t choose to put that in writing.) He also put his party’s energy and border policies on the table, knowing he cannot achieve them through any tactic other than hostage taking.
But Mr. Biden says he won’t let the government and the economy be blackmailed, and he has adamantly rejected the demand that he discuss terms for raising the ceiling. He says it has to be raised cleanly, with no conditions, just as it was three times during the Trump administration. The last time a Democrat negotiated with Republicans over the ceiling was in 2011, when President Barack Obama capitulated and agreed to a deal that created the notorious “supercommittee” to agree on cuts and imposed a stark sequester of spending when the committee couldn’t agree. Almost everyone hated that deal, and Mr. Obama vowed never to negotiate again, an important principle adopted by his vice president.
That doesn’t mean Mr. Biden shouldn’t negotiate about the budget and spending, a separate process that is part of the normal give and take between the White House and Congress. But he can’t do that under a threat of economic catastrophe, and even Republicans are starting to wonder how they will avert it. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the House Rules Committee, said a few days ago that several House members will never vote for any debt ceiling increase, “even if we gave them everything they wanted.” Mr. McHenry said he had never been more pessimistic about reaching an agreement.
Democrats say privately that with the debt ceiling deadline probably arriving this summer, they are counting on mounting pressure from financial markets, already jittery from the recent banking crisis, as well as business lobbyists, to persuade enough Republicans to join Democrats in ending the threat at the last minute. Maybe, but with the radical mind-set that now pervades the House, it’s hard to count on that.
In the end, the best solution is to eliminate the debt ceiling charade once and for all. There are bills in Congress to do so, though few Republicans would support them. And there was a strong argument during the Obama years to test the constitutionality of the ceiling in court, since it appears to violate the 14th Amendment, a tactic still worth trying. Mr. Biden, however, has shown no interest in pursuing that path, and seems to be hoping that this year, Republicans will finally learn that the debt ceiling is not a tool for leverage, because the cost for using it is too high. The country can only brace itself and hope he’s right.
David Firestone
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