Even as the prospects of a deal between the White House and the speaker appear dim, the Senate GOP leader is keeping his distance.
Even as the prospects of a deal between the White House and the speaker appear dim, the Senate GOP leader is keeping his distance.
L ast week, the United States technically hit the debt ceiling — the point at which the government’s statutory authority to incur debt to pay for existing obligations expires — but Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has said she’s confident that the federal government can rely on “extraordinary measures” to avoid defaulting on the debt until at least June 5.
How does the country avoid the financial meltdown that will occur if and when those “extraordinary measures” are exhausted? No one really seems to know.
The Senate has brokered a number of bipartisan deals over the past two years. But, on Tuesday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said it’s up to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden to make a deal on the debt ceiling.
“I can’t imagine any debt-ceiling provision passed out of the Senate with 60 votes could actually pass this particular House,” McConnell said at the weekly Senate GOP press conference. “So I think the final solution to this particular episode lies between Speaker McCarthy and the president.” In December, as part of his efforts to woo Freedom Caucus members who opposed his bid to become speaker, McCarthy vowed to bottle up any legislative priority of Senate Republicans who voted for the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill passed at the end of the last Congress.
Any prospect of a deal between Biden and McCarthy seems far off. Biden has demanded that Congress raise the debt ceiling “without conditions.” Meanwhile, the House GOP rebels who temporarily blocked McCarthy’s election as speaker have demanded steep cuts to spending as a condition of raising the debt ceiling — cuts that couldn’t pass the Senate and likely don’t even have 218 votes in the House — and it’s not clear exactly what the GOP caucus as a whole wants.
“The goals are sort of muddy in terms of what they’re asking for versus what they’d settle for,” says Liam Donovan, a GOP lobbyist who is closely following the debt-ceiling drama.
Representative Chip Roy (R., Texas), a leader of the House GOP holdouts in the speakership fight, told me on the night that McCarthy was elected speaker that “there should be no debt-limit increase unless we’ve got a framework . . . basically that we’ve got bicameral agreement on having passed capped spending at [fiscal year 2022] levels.” During a January 12 interview on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program, Roy said he was pushing for “structural reforms” on spending, but added that “I do think the border crisis is something that ought to be part of” the debt-ceiling “conversation.”
McCarthy doesn’t want to alienate the Freedom Caucus, but it’s very unlikely he could be ousted from the speakership over any debt-limit deal, because Democrats would not join the GOP hardliners to remove him (and force the House to go through potentially several more days of trying to elect a new speaker). “Simply doing what Democrats would call the responsible thing on the debt limit isn’t something that by itself is going to get McCarthy in trouble in that regard,” says Donovan. But, he notes, there are several other ways a handful of angry Republican congressmen could essentially make the House ungovernable, such as denying the majority needed to approve the rules under which a House bill is debated.
The vast gulf between Biden and McCarthy has led to some speculation that the debt ceiling could be raised via a “discharge petition,” which can bring legislation to the floor for a vote with the signatures of 218 members, regardless of what the speaker wants.
“A discharge petition would only take myself and four of my colleagues on the GOP side to side with Democrats, if that’s necessary,” Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.) said earlier this month while discussing the debt ceiling.
But a discharge petition isn’t easy to pull off. First of all, it forces a vote 39 legislative days from the time of its submission, so it can’t be introduced to avert disaster when the government is about to exhaust the “extraordinary measures” taken to avoid default. A legislative day normally coincides with a calendar day when the House is in session, but it officially begins and ends with adjournment. While legislative days aren’t precise, Nick Cattogio points out at the Dispatch that a quick look at the calendar reveals that a discharge petition would need to be introduced very soon if the aim was to have a floor vote on a debt-ceiling deal by the beginning of June.
That brings us to the second problem with a discharge petition: Right now, even Republican moderates such as Fitzpatrick don’t want the “clean” debt-ceiling deal that Biden is demanding. “I don’t think that a clean debt-ceiling [deal] is in order, and I certainly don’t think that a default is in order,” Fitzpatrick told CNN last week. In the same CNN report, Representative Don Bacon (R., Neb.) sounded a similar note:
“I’m not in favor of Biden’s no-negotiating strategy, and I’m not inclined to help,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican whose Nebraska district Biden carried, indicating Republicans campaigned against government spending and inflation. “The GOP can’t demand the moon, and Biden can’t refuse to negotiate. There needs to be give-and-take on both sides.”
Bacon said there needs to be “good faith” talks with the White House and some “commitment for fiscal restraint” before he would even consider signing onto a discharge petition.
And don’t forget, any bill to raise the debt ceiling doesn’t just need five GOP House members; it also needs the support of nine GOP senators to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. “A handful of Senate Republicans helped twice raise the debt ceiling in 2021, and four of those members said on Monday they have no intention of stepping into the breach this time,” Politico’s Burgess Everett reports. “[Maine senator Susan Collins] said she did not know whether a so-called clean debt ceiling increase could even pass the Senate.”
McConnell began his remarks on Tuesday by recalling that he was involved in negotiations with then-vice president Joe Biden that produced the 2011 deal to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for the Budget Control Act (BCA), before noting that Senate Republicans came to see the BCA’s defense-spending cuts as too steep while Democrats came to feel the same way about its cuts to nondefense discretionary spending. “I think it’s entirely reasonable for the new speaker and his team to put spending reduction on the table,” McConnell said. He wasn’t explicit about why “this particular House” would never agree to a Senate-crafted debt-ceiling bill, but it was clear that given McCarthy’s rhetoric over the December omnibus bill and the deal he cut with the Freedom Caucus to secure the speakership, McConnell prefers to stay out of the debt-ceiling talks, at least for the moment. “I wish [Speaker McCarthy] well in talking to the president,” he said. “That’s where a solution lies.”