Debt ceiling theatrics

Goal is not to address debt problem but to let every Member of Congress placate their respective constituents to cling to power

Contrary to ingenues and civic textbooks, politics is not about solving or ameliorating public problems or evils. Indeed, politics is the opposite. The mark of first rate politicians is to keep incendiary issues festering interminably to frighten their constituents into believing they are like Horatius at the bridge defending the country from ruination. Thus, votes on bills are orchestrated to enable each Member to vote his or her political preference while keeping the status quo undisturbed.

The current ostensible debt ceiling standoff between House Republicans and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) against President Joe Biden is a wonderful example. Debt ceiling statutes are more than a century old. They were born in 1917 during World War I. The laws place a ceiling on the aggregate public debt the Executive Branch validly may incur.

They have become as commonplace bird migrations. The debt limit was raised 90 times in the 20th century, 74 times between 1962-2011, 18 times under President Ronald Reagan, 8 times under President Bill Clinton, seven times under President George W. Bush, five times under President Barack Obama, and three times under President Donald Trump.

In none of these hundreds of occasions was it suggested that debt ceiling statutes were legally superfluous because the President is endowed with limitless power under section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment to borrow above any debt ceiling limitation. The relevant text of section 4 reads as follows: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law,…shall not be questioned.” The corollary is that public debt not authorized by law, for example, debt in excess of a statutory debt ceiling, may be questioned.

The assertion or insinuation that President Biden is constitutionally authorized to spend above the debt ceiling is preposterous. No court, including the United States Supreme Court, is going to hold that a time-honored practice that has endured for more than a century and been accepted by Democratic and Republican Presidents alike as constitutional is nevertheless unconstitutional. As Peter Finley Dunne’s Mr. Dooley shrewdly observed long years ago when the Supreme Court was grappling with the question of whether the Constitution applied to territories acquired in the Spanish-American War: “No matter whether th' Constitution follows th' flag or not, 'th Supreme Coort follows th' iliction returns.”

We thus know how this debt ceiling rodeo ends. Speaker McCarthy will utter platitudes about the need to restrain government spending. He will give considerable floor time to House Republicans to whom he gave away his silverware to win the speakership to denounce government spending with the fury of King Lear on the heath. They will earn their spurs with their respective bases. But McCarthy will also give a green light for a handful of moderate Republicans to vote in favor of hiking the debt limit with House Democrats to avoid the political blowback that a debt default would provoke. The Democratic-controlled Senate will approve the House bill which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has agreed not to oppose.

Every Member gets to vote to echo their respective parochial political bases, while the grave problem of a spiraling national debt racing past $31 trillion with escalating carrying costs which might soon swallow all discretionary spending is left unaddressed. Politics as usual.

There was a good reason for Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to quip: “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”