The parties negotiated a deal ahead of schedule, but Congress was only operating at half-strength, and the long-term debt problem remains.
The parties negotiated a deal ahead of schedule, but Congress was only operating at half-strength, and the long-term debt problem remains.
W ith the dust settled on the debt-ceiling negotiations, which produced a bipartisan compromise and prevented a default, is Washington working again?
Despite a constant media narrative portraying Republicans as “terrorists” and “hostage-takers,” Speaker McCarthy was able to strike a rather milquetoast deal with President Biden, ahead of schedule, that passed both chambers of Congress with a comfortable majority. Voters returned a split verdict in 2022, with narrow, opposing majorities in each chamber of Congress, so the situation was not ripe for any major policy changes. The debt-ceiling deal that is now law lived up (or down) to those expectations, doing essentially nothing to affect the long-run trajectory of the debt.
While there was fire-breathing by backbenchers in both parties, neither McCarthy nor Biden engaged in much demonization of the other side, instead using hard-nosed language that would have been typical of politics in previous decades. McCarthy was able to secure a victory by passing a Republican debt-ceiling bill in April that forced Biden to the negotiating table, where he was able to secure a handful of concessions from Biden. Biden was able to say he’s responsibly paying America’s debts and got a bipartisan deal to do so.
In that sense, the process worked. Default would have been bad, and ordinary legislation, passed by both chambers of Congress and signed into law by the president, Schoolhouse Rock–style, prevented that outcome. Both parties gave a little, and not much changed. If you wanted more drastic changes, you should have won a bigger majority (and that goes for both sides).
In a more cynical sense, the process also worked: Politicians successfully avoided having to make any hard decisions that could have been unpopular. Both parties promised they would not touch entitlements at all, in keeping with a promise they had made in a grotesque display at the State of the Union address earlier this year. Entitlements are the primary driver of America’s debt problem, and as long as politicians refuse to reform them, the problem will remain.
There was one important sense in which this process did not work, though, and that was the Senate’s exclusion from the process. The negotiations were between House Republicans and the White House, even though any bill that the House passed would have to go through the Senate first before reaching the president’s desk. The Senate, under Democratic control, was acting as little more than a rubber stamp for Biden.
That’s not how the constitutional order is supposed to work. The legislative negotiations should have been primarily between McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Spending and borrowing are constitutional powers of Congress. The White House would certainly have been involved in those discussions, and it’s proper and sensible for the executive to work with the legislative branch in crafting a deal. But the Senate was almost entirely frozen out of these negotiations.
That’s likely why we were treated to the perverse spectacle of a group of progressive senators calling on Biden to pretend that the 14th Amendment means something it doesn’t mean to ignore the legislation being debated and declare the debt limit unconstitutional. It was perverse because a group of legislators was calling on the executive to unconstitutionally take power away from them. So much for ambition counteracting ambition. Read differently, though, the gambit was a cry for attention by people who should have been participants in the process, not commentators on it.
As American Enterprise Institute congressional scholar Philip Wallach argued recently on an episode of The Remnant, a legislature is supposed to be a political body that generates ideas. It’s not supposed to figure out what the president wants and fall in line behind him. It’s supposed to be decentralized, with solutions emerging from the bottom up, often in ways that are not planned in advance.
That was one reason why McCarthy’s messy ascension to the speakership wasn’t such a bad thing. It was a rare vote in Congress where the outcome was not known in advance, which is how more votes should be. The grueling string of speakership ballots, with concessions to dissenting members to secure their votes, is likely part of the reason McCarthy is shaping up to be a more successful House Republican leader than his predecessors. The House is still nowhere near as decentralized as it could be, though, and Senate Democrats remain content to run the chamber from the leadership office.
If “Washington working” means nothing more than passing routine legislation on time, Washington worked during the debt-ceiling negotiations, but that shouldn’t be sufficient cause for celebration. We should measure whether Washington is working primarily by whether politicians are following the Constitution’s design, which is for deliberative government with separation of powers. The parties successfully negotiated with each other, but they did so while treating the Senate as a rubber stamp for the president, not a chamber of Congress with its own prerogatives and interests.