I’m not going to spend this column trying to explain what the “debt ceiling” is. Nor am I going to defend either the Republican position or the Democratic position in the Senate when it comes to raising the debt ceiling. I’m just going to offer an interpretation of the politics of the present moment.
Joe Biden and the Democrats claim that Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and his 49 GOP colleagues are “playing Russian roulette with the economy,” as the president said Wednesday. The failure to raise the debt ceiling, which they seem to be suggesting will happen unless McConnell and the GOP agree to do it, would send a “meteor . . . to crash the economy.”
Now, if it were true that the Republican refusal here resulted in a failure to increase the debt limit, that would indeed be catastrophic. But it isn’t true. Democrats can raise the debt limit any time they want. They just can’t do it with the cover of some Republican votes.
They know this because they were once on the other side of the meteor. They were once the people who supposedly were playing Russian roulette. Only 15 years ago. And all the major players this time were there that time.
In 2006, Republicans were in power and held the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, just as Democrats do now. And back then, guess what? Democrats voted against raising the debt ceiling.
One such Democrat casting a vote against raising the debt ceiling was . . . current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (Hypocrite-NY). Schumer recently said that “as default gets closer and closer to becoming a reality, our Republican colleagues will be forced to ask themselves how long they are going to keep playing political games while the economic stability of our country is at risk.”
Square that circle, boychick.
And what of the president? Here’s what Joe Biden, then a senator, said in 2006: “Because this massive accumulation of debt was predicted, because it was foreseeable, because it was unnecessary, because it was the result of willful and reckless disregard for the warnings that were given . . . I am voting against the debt-limit increase.”
Oh, and here was Barack Obama in 2006: “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. . . . I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”
In 2013, when Republicans played the same game with the debt limit with him as president, Obama rued what he had done. “That was just an example of a new senator making what is a political vote as opposed to doing what was important for the country,” Obama said. “And I’m the first one to acknowledge it.”
Why are Democrats raining fire and brimstone down on Republican heads when they know this is a game they’ve played themselves?
Simple. Democrats can raise the debt limit without a single Republican vote, but only if they use the process known as “reconciliation.”
This is a gambit they also want to use with their gigantic Build Back Better spending bill, so they don’t want to use the same chit twice this fall.
Even worse, from their perspective: When you use reconciliation to pass a bill, you have to face multiple “amendments” to the bill on the floor of the Senate. This process has come to be known as a “vote-a-rama.”
Democrats know Republicans will use the vote-a-rama to force them to vote on bills they would prefer not to cast an up-or-down, yes-or-no on — matters like police funding, or support for critical race theory, or support for oil pipelines (which put their electoral interests in winning 2022 Senate races in fracking states like Ohio and Pennsylvania on a collision course with environmental big-money donors and their own party’s base).
Now McConnell, who has forgotten more about Senate procedure than you have learned about anything you have ever known, has upped the ante by making an offer to allow the Democrats some time and wiggle room to get their act together, via a short-term, limited boost in the debt ceiling.
It’s a clever move because he’s gesturing toward the need for a debt-limit increase. And he has numbers on his side — by which I mean polling numbers. Biden’s are tanking, and the Democrats are seeing their own numbers fall and the Republicans’ rising when people are asked which party they trust more.
The general appearance of confusion and division is only going to make matters worse for the Democrats. They are twisting in the wind — and the amazing thing is, it’s by their own choice.
They’re in charge. And they’re blowing it.
John Podhoretz is editor of Commentary.