Preparing to Address the Debt Limit without Legislation

David Super

     Overnight, House Republicans made a modest set of tweaks to their deeply unserious debt limit legislation.  Likely more are to come.  Last night’s changes do not affect the basic core of the absurd and impractical design of the package:  ludicrous caps that would force all programs funded with annual appropriations outside of defense and veterans’ health care to be cut 59% within a decade.  The overnight changes included sops to special interests (specifically companies involved in biofuels) and far right advocacy groups (speeding up the purge of millions of extremely poor families from cash assistance and food assistance rolls). 

     The Republican leadership, which can afford to lose only four votes to pass its package, clearly does not have 218 votes yet:  if it did, it would race to the floor like a bat out of [the House Republican Caucus] and call a vote before any more Members think up new demands.  The haggling will therefore continue.  It is moments like these that the leadership is no doubt glad it kept Rep. George Santos around despite his spectacular dishonesty:  if they only had three votes to lose, settling on a bill would be even harder still. 

     At the end of the day, the Republican leadership will almost certainly find a way to get 218 votes for a package.  Those imagining that “the moderates” will force the final package meaningfully back to reality are due to be disappointed:  what few actual moderates remained in recent years were largely purged through primaries, redistricting them into general election defeats, and forced retirements.  And if any secret moderates remain, the fate of those that voted to impeach Donald Trump will surely convince them to limit their moderation to empty posturing. 

     Assuming the House Republicans finally pass their bill, what happens next?  Nobody – not even Senate Republicans – will regard this as an opening bid in a process leading to a deal.  As I noted yesterday, the House Republicans themselves would never attempt to move actual appropriations bills with anything like this level of cuts, and everyone knows it. 

     So the question is what kind of deal on the debt limit could pass.  And the answer, fairly plainly, is none at all.  However this crisis is finally resolved, it is highly unlikely to be through legislation preventing us from hitting the debt limit.  We therefore need to be thinking through the other possibilities. 

     This prediction contradicts the time-honored Washington truism that, in the end, the sober heads will always come together on a deal.  That assumption has mostly been correct, although Bill Clinton’s bull-headedness prevented a deal on major stimulus legislation in 1993 and health care reform in 1994 (despite some quite serious Republican proposals then on the table).  

     My pessimistic prediction also contradicts assumptions that Wall Street Republicans will talk some sense into congressional Republicans, as they did during the last debt limit faceoff in 2021.  I have no doubt that Wall Street will try, but I do not think they have enough leverage in the current House Republican Caucus the way they did in the Senate Republican Caucus that year. 

     Theoretically, a budget deal could pass the House on one of three possible paths:  a bill relying on Democratic votes to offset Republican defections, a more plausible bill passing with just Republican votes, and the current ultra-maximalist Republican package.  Closer examination, however, reveals that none of these options is remotely plausible. 

     A bill relying on Democratic votes could never get to the floor for a vote.  Apart from three Freedom Caucus allies – who would never support such a bill – the Republican leadership has ironclad control of the House Rules Committee (which has a 9-4 Republican majority).  If Kevin McCarthy allowed the Committee to report out a budget bill depending on Democratic votes, the Freedom Caucus would promptly invoke the rule change it won at the beginning of the year to declare the Speaker’s chair vacant.  Someone who abased himself to become speaker as much as Kevin McCarthy did in January is not going to sacrifice that office and end his political career in a likely-failed attempt to bring debt limit legislation to the floor.  And the House Rules Committee routinely disallows floor amendments and other vehicles that could lead to a vote on such a package during the consideration of other legislation. 

     A more substantively realistic Republican-only bill is similarly impossible.  A mere five Freedom Caucus Members could and would block such a bill.  Six of them never voted for Kevin McCarthy for speaker.  Someone who maintains that, in the end, the House Republicans will vote for a plausible budget bill needs to identify which two of Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Eli Crane, Matt Gaetz, Bob Good, and Matt Rosendale they are going to pick off (after, of course, securing the votes of Chip Roy, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan, Andy Ogles, Scott Perry, and the incomparable Marjorie Taylor Greene).  The House Republican Caucus does not have anything approaching 218 Members who are serious about governing or who can be swayed by even the most concerted Wall Street Republican efforts.  As Joe Biden correctly points out, this is not your parents’ Republican Party. 

     That leaves the prospect of enacting something essentially like the current House Republican bill:  legislation fully acceptable to the Freedom Caucus.  Could Democrats decide that the prospect of default is so horrific that they must capitulate completely and pass the House Republicans’ bill?  They would have no leverage to seek any but the most cosmetic changes because, as noted above, neither a bipartisan bill nor a more moderate Republican one could both reach and pass the House floor. 

     This grim option might look like the only path forward at the end of the day, but it, too, does not work.  That is because the House Republicans’ legislation would force a rapid series of additional crises over the next year and a half in which they could and would demand even more disastrous concessions.  First, the debt limit increase in the House Republican bill would not even put off the next debt limit crisis beyond the 2024 elections.  So Democrats would face another choice of fundamentally reshaping the country’s governance or breaching the debt limit barely a year down the line.  And there is no conceivable reason to concede the first time if they are not also going to concede a second.  They could try demanding a larger increase in the debt limit to postpone the second crisis, but what is their leverage?

     Moreover, because the House Republicans’ bill’s caps on annual appropriations are so grossly unrealistic – requiring a one-third reduction in everything but defense and veterans’ health care just in the first year – Democrats would have no choice but to negotiate increases to those caps.  And House Republicans would refuse to make those modifications without offsetting deep cuts in entitlement programs – with cuts of this magnitude effectively impossible without touching Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.  Paul Ryan negotiated cap increases largely “funded” by budgetary gimmicks, but the Freedom Caucus fought him then and is both stronger and more aggressive now. 

     President Biden had a front-row seat to just this kind of sequential unraveling as vice president in the Obama Administration and seems to have learned the lesson that one capitulation inevitably leads to another and another. 

     More generally, Representative Gaetz – who clearly has more influence than Speaker McCarthy – made clear in January that he and his colleagues believe in not making a deal until they run out of “stuff to ask for”.  They dominate the Caucus, and with primaries remaining an effective weapon to keep Republicans from crossing party lines and the Speaker vulnerable to ejection at any moment, nobody has leverage to force them to moderate. 

     The distinctive dynamic in this process is that House Republicans are trying to extort Democrats to provide votes and political cover for a program that Republicans could not and would not implement themselves:  transformational reductions in the role of government and deep cuts to entitlement programs that would infuriate voters and destroy their party if passed on a party-lines vote.  Democrats have no reason to think voters will understand that they were coerced if they vote for legislation implementing such a deal.    

     So no legislative solution to the debt limit crisis is likely to appear:  not now and not later.  Given the disarray House Republicans have shown over the past few weeks, they may very well prefer to relocate this fight to the Fall so that it gets rolled in with negotiations over annual appropriations bills (if the Gaetz-Boebert faction is willing).  But neither dire warnings about threats to the nation’s well-being nor Wall Street Republicans’ muscle will save us this time. 

     Given the hopelessness of negotiating with this particular group of fiscal terrorists, and the difficulty of explaining effectively to voters what the parties’ respective positions are in the inevitable resulting impasse, President Biden is wise to insist that raising the debt limit is non-negotiable.  Democrats should continue to offer Republicans only the clean debt limit increase they granted President Trump after his 2017 tax cuts ballooned the deficit.

     The Administration also needs to decide what it will do when – not if – House Republicans refuse to pass a clean debt limit.  Opinions vary about the relative merits of one of the technical work-arounds (such as selling a $1 trillion platinum coin to the Federal Reserve) or selling bonds at a premium, declaring the debt limit unconstitutional under Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, or a managed default.  But wishful thinking based on an earlier version of the Republican Party that has clearly left the scene serves little constructive purpose. 

     @DavidASuper1