This past Tuesday, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sought unanimous consent to proceed to a majority vote on raising the debt ceiling, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expects will be breached sometime around October 18. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell objected, and it was clear the vast majority of senate Republicans had his back. Global economic meltdown not averted.
I know what you’re thinking. Why would anyone believe anything could get done in the Senate by asking for “unanimous consent”? And why would raising the debt ceiling prevent a global economic meltdown? Allow me a moment to explain.
To begin with, understand that the Senate is basically a legislative Rube Goldberg machine. It doesn’t operate according to Robert’s Rules of Order or the way you would expect your school board or city council to function. In the Senate, as a courtesy to each individual member, unanimous consent is required for nearly every procedural step. That does not mean 100 senators have to be in agreement on everything that comes before the Senate, just that so long as no one objects to a request for unanimous consent, unanimous consent is assumed.
If a senator does object to such a request, however, debate begins on the motion. During a debate, senators, as a matter of privilege, can speak for as long as they want about anything they want, but they can only talk about a single motion or bill once per “day,” which is defined in the Senate as the time between when the Senate is officially convened for business and when it is officially adjourned. If a senator objects and then begins speaking (the chair has to recognize any senator who wants to speak) the presiding officer in the Senate could just wait for that senator to finish, which could take hours, but then another senator could speak, and another, and before you know it, the solar (as opposed to senatorial) days have been filibustered away.
But the Senate has a mechanism to limit debate called cloture. If sixty senators invoke cloture, debate is then limited to 30 hours. If cloture can’t be invoked, that rump of 41-49 senators maintaining the filibuster can keep talking, whittling away the Senate’s precious time. Just note here that if a minority of between 41-49 senators gets mad enough at the majority and really wants to protest, they can object to every unanimous consent motion there is and basically bring the business of the Senate to a halt. Because the majority wants to keep the Senate open for business, any threat of a filibuster is enough for the majority leader to drop a contested motion. The threat of a filibuster also compels the majority leader and minority leader to coordinate with one another on the Senate schedule so that the business of the Senate doesn’t get bogged down in objections to unanimous consent; that also requires the leaders of the parties to consult with the individual members of their caucuses to see if any of them intend on objecting to an order of business, which would of course scramble the Senate’s schedule.
So what Schumer did in asking for unanimous consent to hold a vote on raising the debt ceiling was close to routine business in the Senate. The only thing that was somewhat out of the ordinary was that Schumer actually asked for unanimous consent knowing with near certainty that McConnell was going to object and that he [Schumer] didn’t have 60 votes to invoke cloture. Ordinarily, Schumer wouldn’t have even bothered asking and just moved on to confirming an ambassador or renaming a post office or whatever else was on the docket.
This time around, however, Schumer asked for unanimous consent knowing McConnell would object. That was part of Schumer’s plan. McConnell had earlier stated Republicans would not help Democrats raise the debt ceiling under any condition, meaning Democrats would have to raise it on their own. By asking for unanimous consent to hold a vote on the debt ceiling, Schumer was basically asking McConnell to say nothing and allow the Senate’s fifty Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote to raise the debt ceiling over Republican objections. But McConnell, as is customary these days in the Senate, equated the act of not objecting to effectively endorsing a course of action, and since he doesn’t want Republicans to help Democrats raise the debt ceiling, he objected. Schumer wanted that objection on record.
So why do Democrats so desperately want to raise the debt ceiling? The short answer is to avoid an economic catastrophe. I’ve written about the debt ceiling before; I refer you to that article to learn more about it and the increasingly dangerous games politicians have been playing with it over the past twenty-five years. A really important thing to understand about raising the debt ceiling is that politicians like to take a stand against it because most Americans think raising the debt ceiling is what allows the government to spend money it doesn’t have and consequently go into debt. That’s not the case; unlike, for example, a balanced budget amendment, there is no mechanism that legally prevents Congress from spending however much it wants to spend even if that means going into debt. What the misleadingly-named debt ceiling does is limit how much money the Treasury can spend to pay off the government’s bills. When the government reaches that limit, Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling so the government can meet its financial obligations. Raising the debt ceiling, therefore, basically keeps the government from going into default. Put another way, raising the debt ceiling allows the government to pay for things it’s already bought on credit.
It kind of works like this: Imagine you go to the mall and use purchase orders to buy $1,000,000 worth of goods across all the mall’s stores. Later that month, when the bills for what you’ve purchased come due, instead of paying them off in full, you return to the mall, convene a meeting of all the stores’ owners, and tell them that you have authorized yourself to only pay back $750,000 worth of debt—your “debt ceiling”—and, since you have not yet raised that ceiling, you will not be paying them back the total amount you owe. That is bound to make the store owners very angry. Some will never let you buy from them again; some will probably go bankrupt (which may affect other franchises in other malls) or struggle financially since they had operated under the assumption you would pay them back; the mall as a whole would be pushed to the brink of economic collapse; and other malls, stores, and financial institutions who got wind of what you did would either refuse to work with you or make the costs for you to work with them much higher. This is doubly bad if you happen to be the mall’s biggest customer.
You can imagine how bad it would be if this scenario didn’t involve a customer at a mall but rather the United States and the world economy. Granted, no one knows for sure what would happen if the world’s largest economic engine chose not to make good on its bills, but economists think it would be pretty bad and that it’s not worth the risk to find out for sure. Some might come back and say they still don’t want to raise the debt ceiling because they believe the government shouldn’t have spent that much money and gone that deeply into debt in the first place, which, OK, I get where you’re coming from, but raising the debt ceiling isn’t an argument over how much we’re spending or what we’re spending on or how much we should go into debt but rather whether or not we should pay our bills, to which the answer should always be “yes.”
Even Mitch McConnell believes the government should pay its bills. The problem is that paying those bills requires the government to raise the debt ceiling, and McConnell and the Republicans do not want to take the political heat for “raising the debt ceiling.” That’s insane because if “raising the debt ceiling” was instead called “defusing the default tripwire,” Republicans would probably rush to take care of that. Instead, McConnell is taking advantage of (some would say “weaponizing”) the public’s ignorance of what “raising the debt ceiling” actually means, tying that to a Democratic spending package that has yet to become law, and forcing Democrats to do all the politically unpopular heavy lifting on their own.
And yes, Democrats are playing a bit of politics here, too, because they’d like Republicans to provide some bipartisan cover for raising the debt ceiling since, again, most of the American people don’t understand what raising the debt ceiling actually means. (One part of me wonders if Schumer is also turning this into a crisis to compel reconciliation package hold-outs Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema to get behind the Democratic legislative agenda; if he is, that is one dangerous game Schumer is playing.) Regardless the politics, though, Democrats can at least fall back on the argument that raising the debt ceiling is a necessity. There’s also the fact that Republicans have dealt with the debt ceiling in the past, and that the last time it was raised (or at least suspended) was in September 2019, meaning about 90% of the debt accumulated since that time (some of it generated by the 2017 tax cuts, a lot of it generated by COVID relief and stimulus packages) occurred when Trump was in the White House and Republicans ran the Senate.
There is a way for Democrats to raise the debt ceiling on their own through the reconciliation process, which allows the Senate to bypass regular order (and with it, the threat of a filibuster) in order to pass certain legislation related to the budget with only a simple majority vote. Republicans are insisting Democrats follow that path, although that’s a lengthy and complicated process that should have started weeks ago, may not finish before the debt ceiling is breached, and would still require cooperation from Republicans, who would likely use the opportunity to extract concessions from Democrats or sabotage the process in committee. Schumer yesterday practically took that option off the table.
In the midst of this entire drama, McConnell has pulled what should be referred to from now on as a “McConnell,” which is when a politician invents a principle out of whole cloth to justify an action. This time around, McConnell’s “McConnell” asserts that whenever one party controls both houses of Congress and the presidency, it falls upon that party alone to raise the debt ceiling. That’s never been a thing; in fact, the vote to raise the debt ceiling has almost always entailed some sort of bipartisan support regardless of unified control of Congress and the presidency.
McConnell’s latest McConnell is reminiscent of the time he blocked President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in early 2016 by asserting the Senate could not take up consideration of an appointment to the Supreme Court in a presidential election year. Four years later and about six weeks before a presidential election, he rushed President Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court through the Senate, claiming his old principle did not apply when the president and the majority of the Senate were of the same party. Then, a few months later, he blocked an effort in the Senate to impeach Trump while Trump was still in office for instigating the 1/6 riot by claiming there wasn’t enough time to conduct the trial, only to vote to acquit Trump a few months later during his impeachment trial by arguing the time had passed to convict him since Trump was no longer in office. When it comes to matters of principle, McConnell’s credibility is pretty much shot.
It is often said the Senate can only function if its unique institutional norms and traditions are maintained by a membership that exercises forbearance in conducting the business of the body. Because the rules of the Senate can so easily be exploited by single members, it falls upon senators to work in good faith with one another to keep the institution from breaking down. If a senator steps out of line, there are supposed to be institutional consequences for abusing that faith. While both parties share some of the blame for the Senate’s degeneration as a functional legislative body, Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans have pushed the Senate—and the country—to the breaking point. “The Democrats say they don’t need our votes to spend the money they want to spend, but they do need our votes to pay for it. That dog won’t hunt,” said not Mitch McConnell or Ted Cruz but Mitt Romney. With supposedly “reasonable” senators misleading the public like that on grave economic matters, it’s high time for Democrats to respond accordingly.
The easiest way forward would be for Democrats to eliminate the filibuster for debt ceiling increases, or better yet, eliminate the filibuster to formally abolish the debt ceiling so the Treasury is never hampered in its ability to pay the country’s bills. All Schumer would need to do is ask for unanimous consent to bring a bill to a vote and then raise a point of order to claim cloture can be invoked with a simple majority after a Republican objects. When the chair states it cannot, Schumer then moves to change that rule, and a simple majority can toss it. After that, a simple majority could then raise or eliminate the debt ceiling.
If Schumer did this, McConnell would throw the hissiest of fits and complain about how the Democrats had just tossed aside time-honored Senate traditions and torched the Senate’s spirit of bipartisanship, which would be ironic since McConnell has been insisting all this time that Democrats must act in a partisan fashion to raise the debt ceiling, which traditionally has been done on a bipartisan basis. McConnell then may start objecting every time Schumer asks for unanimous consent, but if he goes this route, Schumer might as well change those rules, too, which may just be the kick in the pants the Senate as an institution needs to finally reform the way it does business.
Some may be reluctant to take these steps as they would shatter the sense of trust between Republicans and Democrats that is necessary for governance. That trust has already been shattered, though, and I would argue Republicans need to demonstrate they are trustworthy before Democrats treat them as partners in governance again. Is it wise to trust Republicans to secure the health and well-being of the people after the way they conducted themselves during the pandemic? Is it wise to trust them with the health and well-being of our democracy after 1/6, after they refused to impeach and convict Trump for instigating that, after refusing to investigate it, and as they continue to sow doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election? Is it wise to trust Republicans with the health and well-being of the economy when they demagogue the debt ceiling and won’t even get out of the way so Democrats can lift it on their own?
In fact, another good reason to get rid of the debt ceiling all together is that there’s a good chance Republicans will win control of either the House or Senate or both in 2022. Furthermore, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2024 thought COVID could be treated with bleach injections and shut down the government for a month because Congress wouldn’t fund his border wall; what happens if he wins back the White House in 2024 and decides to take the debt ceiling hostage? The debt ceiling is a ticking time bomb at the center of our economy, and since there’s no sign the Republican Party is becoming less unhinged as the days pass, it’s perfectly reasonable to worry that someday they may not be able to get their act together to raise it before disaster strikes. Rather than trust that Republicans will raise it on their own when they’re in power, just remove the danger by eliminating it all together.
Unfortunately, President Biden is not inclined to encourage the Senate to change its rules regarding the filibuster to either raise or abolish the debt ceiling. It’s also not clear someone like Joe Manchin would endorse such a plan either. Consequently, it’s not clear at all how the Senate intends on raising the debt ceiling before October 18th, which is pretty damn scary. Perhaps Schumer’s plan is to take us to the brink of crisis so that “raising the debt ceiling” becomes less about “debt” and more about “economic stability.” If he did that, maybe Republicans would finally allow Democrats to raise it on their own. Or, better yet, maybe Democrats will conclude Republicans can’t be trusted to perform this simple yet absolutely necessary task, change the rules of the Senate to handle it themselves, and eliminate the debt ceiling once and for all. At this point, McConnell is practically begging Democrats to do it.
Thanks for reading.
Exit music: “Message of Love” by Pretenders (1981, Pretenders II)