This is not an adult way to manage a $6 trillion enterprise

The current stars in the debt ceiling melodrama may not have the nous to keep the train from running over the damsel in distress.

The juvenility of our political class is never more evident, or dangerous, than in the perennial melodrama over raising the debt ceiling.

The roles and dialogue of the actors are set in advance, and interchangeable between the parties. 

If one party is in charge of both the White House and Congress, that party has to come up with the votes to pass an increase, while the minority party bewails runaway debt and fiscal irresponsibility. It doesn’t matter which party is in the majority. The script is the same. If there is a change in control, the two sides just exchange talking points cards. 

When there is divided government, as there is now, the play gets more complicated, but the respective roles are just as predetermined. Whoever is president, irrespective of party, demands a clean increase in the debt ceiling, arguing that holding one up for other policy changes is irresponsible. Members of the president’s party in Congress echo that. The other party says that true irresponsibility would be continuing the wicked status quo and demands policy changes.

It doesn’t matter if those holding office at the time had argued exactly the opposite when positions were reversed, which happens to be the case with those playing leading roles in the current melodrama. 

In the past when there was divided government, the impasse has been finessed. But there is reason to fear that the current stars of the melodrama don’t have the nous to keep the train from running over the damsel in distress. Joe Biden has lost more than a step and increasingly acts as a partisan flamethrower, rather than as someone committed to governing within the political reality the body politic has put before him. Kevin McCarthy is on a short MAGA leash and has no track record of forging bipartisan deals. To the extent there have been bipartisan successes in the Senate, they have been accomplished around Chuck Schumer, not through him. Hakeem Jeffries is untested as a deal-making minority leader. 

The only star who unquestionably has the chops is Mitch McConnell, and he says he is sitting this one out. It’s up to Biden and McCarthy to make a deal, is the Senate GOP position. The ability of the federal government to pay its bills may depend on McConnell changing his tack, and quickly.

This is not an adult way to manage a $6 trillion enterprise. 

The Republicans are correct that spending restraint is greatly needed, even if they are hypocritical given their spendthrift ways when Donald Trump was president. Their proposal to roll back discretionary spending to 2022 levels and then hold increases to 1% a year for ten years isn’t unreasonable.

If pre-Covid spending were increased by 5% a year, the federal budget would clock in at $5.7 trillion in 2024. Instead, Biden proposes to spend $6.9 trillion. Biden is converting what was supposed to be one-time emergency spending related to Covid into a significantly higher permanent base and measuring “cuts”, actually reductions in the rate of increase, from there.

That, however, doesn’t mean that the debt ceiling proposal by House Republicans is reasonable or responsible, and it has been disappointing to see usually sensible commentators on the right treat it as such.

The House GOP proposal only increases the debt ceiling through next March. So, 10 months of debt ceiling relief for 10 years of spending constraints. That’s a political gimmick, to say the House has passed something, not a serious or good-faith opening bid.

The House proposal would decrease projected debt by nearly $5 trillion over the decade. But even with the GOP spending constraints in place, federal debt would still increase by over $14 trillion during that stretch, without any debt ceiling increase to facilitate it. 

An adult approach to managing a $6 trillion enterprise wouldn’t include repeating a potentially devastating impasse threatening the good faith and credit of the U.S. government just 10 months from now. In fact, an adult approach would junk the debt ceiling, which isn’t constitutionally required, entirely, on the grounds that the kids can’t be trusted with it. 

One way out that some are seeing and suggesting would be a short-term debt ceiling increase until the end of the federal government’s fiscal year in September, when Congress will have to pass a spending measure of some sort to keep the lights on. That way, Republicans could say that a longer increase in the debt ceiling is linked to spending and Democrats could say that they are independent and on separate tracks.

That, however, just highlights the juvenility. There is a budget law that sets forth a process for Congress to enact appropriations bills in a timely manner. The Senate Budget Committee was supposed to report out a budget resolution, providing general spending parameters for next year, by April 1. Both chambers of Congress were to have agreed on a budget resolution by April 15. The House Appropriations Committee is to report out all appropriations bills by June 10. The full House is supposed to approve all appropriations bills by June 30.

None of these deadlines have or will be met. 

If House Republicans were serious about reducing spending, rather than holding an increase in the debt ceiling hostage to unenforceable constraints on future spending, they would be approving actual appropriations bills that spend less in the here and now. That would be the adult way of doing it.

This column has probably been unfair in comparing our political class to juveniles. Unfair to the nation’s youth, that is. I strongly suspect that the federal fisc would be more competently and responsibly managed if the task were turned over to a randomly selected assembly of high school sophomores. Hard to imagine how they could do worse.  

Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.