{"id":186205,"date":"2021-05-31T13:43:19","date_gmt":"2021-05-31T13:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radiofree.asia\/?guid=5498524801a116b33af2f1cd4a5dff5b"},"modified":"2021-05-31T13:43:19","modified_gmt":"2021-05-31T13:43:19","slug":"the-gop-only-cares-about-the-debt-ceiling-when-spending-goes-toward-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/05\/31\/the-gop-only-cares-about-the-debt-ceiling-when-spending-goes-toward-the-people\/","title":{"rendered":"The GOP Only Cares About the Debt Ceiling When Spending Goes Toward the People"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Senate<\/a>

In his extraordinary early 20th-century memoir, The Education of Henry Adams<\/em>, Adams, the scholar, political observer and descendant of two presidents, wrote of the inherent dysfunction and dishonesty of the U.S. Congress. He wrote of a Cabinet Secretary crying out, \u201cYou can\u2019t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!\u201d Of the Senate, Adams observed that \u201cSenators passed belief. The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extravagance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson that at times the whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent reason \u2026 they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them \u2026 But their egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter. They did permanent and terrible mischief.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was reminded of those lines when reading that GOP senators are, once again, sententiously threatening to refuse to lift the national debt ceiling in July<\/a> unless the Biden administration agrees to sweeping cuts in spending.<\/p>\n

Were there consistency in the GOP\u2019s arguments, that would be one thing. But there isn\u2019t, and there hasn\u2019t been this past decade. Put simply, the GOP cares deeply about the debt limit when Democrats are in the White House, and cares not a whit about that limit when the commander-in-chief is a Republican.<\/p>\n

It used to be the case that politicians of both parties tacitly agreed not to play party politics with the national debt. After all, the U.S.\u2019s cast-iron guarantee that it won\u2019t default on its loan obligations is what allows the country to maintain such a privileged position in global marketplaces, borrowing at far lower rates of interest than can most other countries, and allowing it to fund everything from its bloated military budget to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and vital infrastructure without taxing Americans at a level that would actually fully underwrite all of these programs. As soon as uncertainty is injected into that calculus, the likelihood increases that credit agencies will downgrade the country\u2019s credit-worthiness and borrowing costs will significantly rise.<\/p>\n

Since the Tea Party-dominated Republican Party swept to power in the House in the midterm elections of 2010, however, it\u2019s become a central political axiom that the GOP will use the debt ceiling as a bargaining tool when dealing with Democratic presidents and their political priorities.<\/p>\n

The GOP is now pulling the same trick against Joe Biden as its members did several times during Barack Obama\u2019s presidency. Over a period of months in 2011<\/a>, the newly minted GOP majority in the House withheld support for raising the debt ceiling, leading to a series of stop-gap spending resolutions that kept the government just about afloat, but unable to make long-term fiscal plans. They actually did shut down the government for days and weeks on end in 2013, as they tried to force negotiations over defunding the Affordable Care Act<\/a> in exchange for funding government, a form of political vandalism and blackmail that would have hit the poor and the vulnerable particularly hard. And then, from 2013 through to late 2015, the GOP continued to threaten shutdowns, agreeing only to last-minute debt ceiling increases, and creating ongoing instability as they tried to leverage their power to force spending cuts.<\/p>\n

Only in November 2015<\/a>, after four years of blackmail over the debt ceiling, did Congress agree to a nearly one-and-a-half-year suspension of the ceiling, allowing for the government to be able to borrow enough money to fund its spending obligations.<\/p>\n

During the Trump presidency, however, when the national debt soared by $7.8 trillion<\/a> (in large part fueled by GOP-supported tax cuts for the wealthy, as well as large increases in military and border spending), these voices of fiscal conservatism were largely silenced.<\/p>\n