We can finally exhale. The House of Representatives passed an agreement to suspend the debt ceiling until 2025, and the Senate approved the measure late Thursday. Congress — Republicans in Congress — aren’t going to blow up the economy. This time.
Because make no mistake, this vote was not a sure thing. Had Speaker Kevin McCarthy managed things less adeptly; had President Joe Biden been more anxious about his standing within his party; had the negotiators for McCarthy and the White House been less skilled; had former President Donald Trump stumped hard against the deal: There was a real chance of something going badly wrong.
A default on the nation’s debt would have been calamitous. And for what? The debt limit has no positive or useful function. No other nation has a comparable rule requiring separate legislative permission to pay for already-approved spending measures. Budget process experts and economists consider it utterly useless. As journalist Kai Ryssdal said Wednesday: “The debt limit is just so, so, so freakin’ stupid, and we’ve got so many other things we need to grapple with. What a waste of time.”
The good news is that after this near-debacle, Democrats are going to be even more convinced that the debt limit has to go. As with many policy issues, it’s less a question of the party’s preference of what should be done than it is about how high it is on the agenda. And this particular policy is tricky, because while it will require unified Democratic government to eliminate it, the limit only becomes a problem when we have divided government. So Democrats would need to decide to get rid of the debt ceiling whenever they next control both houses of Congress and the White House, in anticipation of when they don’t.
Still, I expect that Democrats will be far more eager to eliminate the debt limit the next time they have the opportunity.