How divided government is supposed to work
The debt ceiling deal commits leaders of both parties to governing.
A glance at the debt ceiling bill that Congress votes on this week shows that President Biden seems to have gained a big thing—raising the debt ceiling for two years—in exchange for several small things.
It’s frustrating to Democrats who said Biden should not concede anything in exchange for the ordinary working of government. Raising federal borrowing authority was necessary to finance spending that Congress already approved. Charging any price to avoid a catastrophic default was akin to hostage-taking, they said. Biden himself said he would not negotiate over default, and even as he made an agreement with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, he maintained that he negotiated over spending levels, not the debt limit itself.
The details of the agreement show not that much change in the federal budget. This analysis by my NPR colleagues Ximena Bustillo and Claudia Grisales shows a package that is smaller, less sweeping, and less onerous than might have been expected. It excludes key parts of Biden’s budget proposal, such as tax hikes on the wealthy. It drastically pares down Republican demands; and it does include a few Republican provisions that Biden himself might not have minded at all.
Republicans wanted limits on spending for an entire decade in exchange for raising the debt limit for less than one year. The agreement instead extends the debt limit for two years, in exchange for two years of restraint on spending. This analysts by Peter Baker shows that even for the two years, the spending caps are less extreme than Republicans wanted.
Republicans wanted to roll back $87 billion in funding, approved by the previous Democratic Congress, that made the IRS more effective. Instead, nearly all that funding is preserved. One slice of it, $10 billion, is diverted. This fig leaf of a cut gives Republican lawmakers something to say when they are interviewed in the right-wing media ecosystem, where the IRS funding had been distorted and demonized. The $10 billion is to be diverted to other Democratic priorities, which gives Democratic lawmakers a fig leaf too.
Republicans wanted big changes in work requirements for people receiving federal aid. Instead, there are modest changes around the edges, although real people will be affected by them.
Baker notes that Biden himself has supported work requirements in the past. And if, as the White House has said, Biden is concerned about the size of federal deficits, he may not mind modest restraints on the growth of the federal budget. Democrats’ fear was that Republicans would use the debt ceiling as a lever to roll back Biden’s whole legacy. That didn’t happen.
As this negotiation unfolded, some Democrats asked why they were in this situation at all. Some, as I noted here, felt that Biden should have invoked a provision of the Constitution to ignore the debt ceiling. Others, as this report indicates, felt that Democrats alone should have raised the debt ceiling last December, when they still had full control of Congress.
The agreement has an advantage over either of those options, provided Congress actually passes it this week. It commits the leadership of both parties to governing. The other options would not have done so. Those options would have left Republicans free to book TV time to decry a lawless presidency while assuming no responsibility whatsoever for the hard decisions they were elected to make. Republicans would have been liberated from any need to do their jobs.
Instead of selling their voters a toxic fantasy (that they should have been able to get everything they demanded; that anything less was a betrayal of America; or that, as Donald Trump said recently, they should have gone for default) Republican leaders can tell their voters they got a realistic result in divided government. It clears the way for them to resume the basic work of Congress and then to fight for greater control in 2024. If you take a long view of preserving democratic institutions, this is the one big thing the agreement gained—bigger even than the two-year debt ceiling increase.
Biden said that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had done what he promised: negotiate in good faith. Some suspense remains as to whether McCarthy can rally enough of his caucus to pass the bill and keep his job. Democrats will have to produce votes to help him, and there is a little suspense there too, although Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, in this interview last winter, told me his caucus would get it done. It was an ugly process with much to criticize, but if it succeeds, it will be a rough approximation of how the system is supposed to work.
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