The Unseriousness of the House Republicans’ Debt Limit Bill

David Super

     Much of the news media has been surprisingly credulous of the House Republicans’ debt limit bill.  Several reporters have asked my opinions of various details of the bill as if it was a legislative proposal that might form the basis for an ultimate resolution.  The truth is actually very much the opposite:  this bill tends to confirm the suspicions many of us have had that no deal is going to be possible. 

     These reporters, as well as others not accustomed to working on budgetary issues, miss the key distinction between a bad proposal and an unserious one.  It is possible to negotiate with someone making a bad proposal, even a very bad one; whether one chooses to do so or not, of course, is another question.  When someone makes a profoundly unserious proposal, however, they are signaling that they are unwilling or unable to come to grips with the issue at hand.  Unless and until they can do so, no negotiation is possible. 

     The House Republicans’ proposal is, indeed, very bad public policy from my perspective, from that of congressional Democrats, from that of the President, and likely from that of many moderates.  That, by itself, does not render this proposal unserious.  But this proposal is also very bad public policy from the perspective of the House Republicans themselves:  this is not something that any significant number of them would actually want to implement in the real world.  That they are unable to advance a proposal that at least they would like to see become U.S. public policy means we are a very long way from any process that could lead to a congressional budget deal. 

     The House Republicans have proposals that would dramatically increase the ranks of those without health insurance and those facing hunger as well as ones that would rapidly gridlock the administrative state.  These are all very bad ideas.  It is possible, however, that House Republicans actually want these things to become law. 

     The core of their proposal, however, is a cap on annual appropriations dramatically below the levels required to maintain current levels of activity.  These cuts would be 13% in the fiscal year beginning this October and would rise rapidly to 24% by 2033.  Cutting most programs 13%, much less 24%, would require radical reductions in the role of government in our society.  Those figures, however, dramatically understates the proposal’s effect. 

     House Republicans insist that they do not want to cut defense spending.  Many also insist that they would protect veterans’ health care – the single largest non-defense discretionary appropriations account.  If Congress protected the Defense Department, but not veterans’ health care, from cuts, the reductions in everything else would be 27% in the first year and 49% after a decade.  If Congress protected both defense and veterans’ health care, everything else in the annually appropriated budget would have to be cut by one-third immediately, with a 59% reduction required in ten years. 

     Of course, those are only average reductions.  Many functions we obviously are not going to cut (e.g., congressional salaries, the President’s Secret Service detail, air traffic controllers, TSA inspectors).  Each time an essential program is taken off the table, or is allowed to absorb a cut smaller than 59%, the cut to everything else must become even deeper. 

     House Republicans, of course, offer no suggestions – not even bad ones – for how they would meet these targets.  They have not, and most assuredly will not, introduce a single appropriations bill that would mark to these limits or anything remotely close.  They could not come close to passing such a bill even in the House.  President Biden has quite appropriately been pointing out that his budget includes the complete text of the appropriations bills he would like to see enacted and asking House Republicans to offer comparable clarity.   

     House Republicans therefore are demanding not just that Democrats accept their radical policies but that Democrats provide political cover and votes for policies House Republicans would not vote to pass themselves. 

     What would happen if Congress and the President actually enacted the House Republicans’ draconian appropriations caps?  We have a pretty good idea because House Republicans tried something quite similar a decade ago.  Then, House Speaker John Boehner insisted that increases in the debt limit be matched with reductions in appropriations caps.  Facing his threats to let the nation default, President Obama caved, agreeing to what came to be known as the sequestration appropriations cuts. 

     The caps the Budget Control Act of 2011 imposed were considerably less draconian than those House Republicans are advancing now.  But they were still wholly unrealistic, and House Republicans knew it.  Rather than attempting to meet the caps they themselves had insisted upon, House Republicans negotiated cap increases every single year covered by the Budget Control Act.  They did not even try to meet the levels they had mandated:  they would mark up several appropriations bills with average cuts well short of those required but hold back the large Labor-HHS-Education bill so that the total of their bills did not exceed the caps.  The Labor-HHS-Education bill would move only after they raised the caps. 

     The cuts imposed during President Obama’s second term did lasting harm to the country even with the increased caps House Republicans negotiated, but that process also showed the unseriousness of pretending to reduce the deficit with austere budget caps wholly disconnected from any actual policy proposals. 

     If Democrats, through some combination of amnesia and madness, were to agree to cuts of the kind House Republicans are proposing, we could hope that the House Republicans would again seek relief from their own proposal.  The current composition of their caucus, however, makes that unlikely.  The same extremists that took Kevin McCarthy to fifteen ballots before electing him speaker would scuttle any increase in the caps.  Appropriators would find writing specific bills to meet these targets politically hyper-toxic and likely would sit on their hands.  We then would get a government shutdown with the precipitating party – the House Republicans – having no proposal of their own. 

     By advancing a proposal that even his own caucus would never implement, Speaker McCarthy has confirmed that he has little to bring to any bargaining table.  Democrats will not, and should not, negotiate with someone so evidently lacking the authority to commit his own caucus.  In a subsequent post I will address what I think will happen with the debt limit.

     @DavidASuper1