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The country is on the brink of financial calamity and Democrats are poised to potentially alter the contours of the Senate with a possible one-time rule change that would allow them to pass a debt ceiling hike well ahead of the 18 deadline. October. .
It’s a strategy that Democratic leaders have socialized since last week in the caucus, but the idea was given serious impetus on Tuesday night when President Biden said it was “a real possibility” that Democrats would establish a exclusion of obstruction rules to let the debt ceiling be increased by a simple majority vote.
Here’s a look at the options (from most likely to least likely at this point) that Congress should increase the country’s borrowing limit by that date:
Democrats are changing the rules: This option is currently the most serious. CNN learned early Tuesday that it was on the table, raised at a private lunch last week, and was the subject of a conversation on Tuesday. It is essentially a removal of the systematic obstruction of the debt limit. The rationale for leadership here is that they don’t need Republicans to raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation.
So why do they need 60 votes to do otherwise? Some Democrats argue it wouldn’t amount to going nuclear or detonating the filibuster of the legislation, but you can imagine how that will be seen by Republicans as a slippery slope. The ability to use this tool, however, is only possible if every Democrat agrees to do so. Moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia threw in cold water on Monday. On Tuesday, he said he was not going to talk about it and that it was up to the leaders to find a deal. We’ll see if anything changes.
Arizona’s moderate Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema has also expressed deep concerns about the legislative filibuster change, but let’s keep an eye out for those two as this is a narrower change.
Democrats give in and reconcile: For weeks this seemed like the most obvious option, but time is really running out for it. The process is long and complicated. It forces Democrats to say exactly how much they are increasing the debt by and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer led his caucus by saying he was not going.
The process would require Democrats to pass a budget, put it on the floor, debate it for 15 hours, engage in a series of marathon votes known as the vote-a-rama, ask the finance committee to write the debt ceiling increase, return it to the floor for another 20 hours of debate, do another vote-a-rama and finish it. That’s a lot, and you can see why Democrats want to avoid it. But it is an option and until Tuesday it was perhaps the most likely.
It is now changed.
Republicans give in: This is what the Democrats hope. They bring the debt ceiling bill passed by the House to the ground. No Republican imposes a 60-vote threshold, and Democrats vote to raise the debt ceiling by simple majority. But, that does not happen on Wednesday. It won’t happen Thursday, and no, it won’t happen next week either.
Even if the GOP leaders got to a point where they let this slide slip, Roy Blunt, a Republican leader from Missouri, summed it up pretty well: “We really wouldn’t have the capacity to control all 50 of our members. about this question .”
See: Sens. Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, Ted Cruz from Texas, Josh Hawley from Missouri and Bill Hagerty from Tennessee (who have not been afraid in the past to delay things).
Biden does this using the 14th Amendment: There is no evidence that the White House is seriously considering the idea, but Senate Democrats have discussed it in private. In the 14th Amendment, there is a public debt clause which says that the “validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debt incurred for the payment of pensions and bonuses for service rendered in the repression of an insurrection or a rebellion should not be called into question. . “Some read this to mean that the president can just keep paying the country’s debts. The potential problem with this route is that it would likely end up in court. It has absolutely not been tested for this use, c that’s why he’s not really on the table right now.
Learn more about the debt ceiling situation here.
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