It’s encouraging to hear that congressional Democrats are starting to wake up and realize that President Biden’s intransigence on negotiating about the debt ceiling is bad for America.
POLITICO reports that House members like Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), and Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) are publicly (and others, privately) calling for President Biden to do the right thing and work with House GOP leaders, including Speaker McCarthy, to forge a compromise.
Yesterday, the House GOP passed their debt limit legislation, “The Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023.” The debt limit currently stands at $31.4 trillion, a staggering and unsustainable amount that under current projections will only grow and cripple future generations.
The bill includes work requirements for welfare benefits for able-bodied adults (something the vast majority of Americans agree with), provisions to boost domestic energy production (which will help reduce inflation), and nixes funding for 87,000 new IRS agents.
It also includes provisions for a one percent cap on spending, ends a $300 billion green energy slush fund, and stipulates no new major regulations without approval by Congress. It also includes a one-year increase in the debt ceiling.
On Thursday the Committee To Unleash Prosperity in its email newsletter, the Hotline, released a graphic showing the history of congressional negotiations around debt limit legislation.
“Joe Biden is still insisting that raising the debt ceiling is ‘not negotiable,’” the Hotline authors write. “Huh? Since when? For decades now the debt ceiling has often been the leverage point that forces both parties to negotiate budget deals to limit federal spending and borrowing. Biden himself negotiated the last debt ceiling deal – the Budget Control Act – back in 2011 as Barack Obama’s Vice President. Has he forgotten that already?”
In this era of hyper-government spending, where everything is supposedly a crisis, it seems that President Biden is the one with historical amnesia who is being unreasonable. Here’s hoping he does the right thing.