Getting the Debt Ceiling Done Before February 1st: The Democratic-Republican War on the Redistribution of the House and the Senate

The Treasury Department is expected to hit its borrowing limit next year but it is not certain when it will have to resort to extraordinary measures to keep payments flowing.

Indeed, the debt limit is poised to be breached sometime next year, and already a major battle is shaping up to raise it, even as McConnell has long found circuitous ways to avert default. In the meantime, Senate Republicans are eager to finish up this year’s funding package in the final days of the current Congress controlled by Democrats, a move that would take a major battle over a potential government shutdown off the table early next year.

Goldman Sachs economists wrote in an analysis this week that bipartisan support to raise the debt limit would be hard to achieve in the current political climate and that the United States could reach its potential if it did so. The analysts also noted that less than a quarter of Republicans and less than a third of Democrats who will serve in the House in 2023 were there in 2011.

“If I were going to continue here, I would hope they would do it now,” said Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, one of several Republicans retiring at the end of the year, in an interview. “We all know that on Feb. 1, the 2024 presidential races start, so you’re automatically already in the political season before you do anything next year, and I would hate for one side or the other to take the debt ceiling and to use it for the purposes purely being political.”

“The way we’ve done debt ceiling in the past is bipartisan,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said at a news conference last month. “I’d like to see it done in a bipartisan way and get it done before the end of the year.”

The government funding standoff gripping Washington ahead of Friday’s shutdown deadline is one of the first indicators of the coming shift in power dynamics that will return the capital to a governing cold war between congressional Republicans and a Democratic White House.

If lawmakers cannot agree on a deal, they will face the possibility of either passing a short-term spending bill to carry the debate into the new Congress or a longer-term continuing resolution that would extend current spending levels.

There could be paralysis in the government, with neither side able to deliver on their promises to the people, when Republicans won the House and Democrats retained control of the Senate in last month’s elections.

The government may be shut down or the US economy may be harmed if there are disagreements over funding social programs and raising the borrowing limit. This heralds a return of the government shutdown threats that were a regular holiday season tradition during the Obama administration after Republicans gained congressional majorities. The government shut down for 35 days over the holiday season because of a dispute over the president’s demands for border wall funding.

The GOP senators wrote a letter to McConnell last week laying out their strategy and urging him to block the spending bill and keep the government running for a few weeks.

Their stance helps explain why McConnell made a dire prediction for a deal with Democrats on a big funding bill, commenting “We don’t have agreements to do virtually anything.” … We have no idea how much we will spend, and we’re running out of time.

McCarthy’s comment blindsided McConnell, according to multiple senators. While the House GOP leader had signaled privately – including at a White House meeting – that he’d be open to a large spending deal to finish this year’s business, Republicans were not expecting him to take aim at McConnell even if he publicly came out against the package. But as McConnell continually worked behind the scenes to cut a massive funding deal – effectively clearing McCarthy’s decks for the next Congress – the House GOP leader increasingly voiced his strong opposition against it.

Last week, a senior Biden administration official said that even a short funding agreement would have negative consequences for key programs.

Causality in the House: Reply to the Fox News Report by J.C. McConnell on a House Appropriate to Reduction of Social Programs

On Sunday, it was implied that Republicans were hoping to jam Democrats at the end of this year to try to get a reduction in spending on social programs in the new GOP House.

Republicans seem to see it as an opportunity to hold us hostage and have demands that they wouldn’t make under normal circumstances.

They have made it clear that they want to cut Medicaid, and that they want to cut Social Security, according to Dana Bash.

Biden sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin up to Capitol Hill last week to brief senators on the war in Ukraine. Republicans emerged from the meeting complaining that the two secretaries spent too much time lobbying for an omnibus bill rather than working on a continuing resolution.

It was a waste of time. John Kennedy believes that it was a waste of time. He said that Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had asked Blinken and Austin to explain why the new spending bill was so necessary. “I knew as soon as Chuck said that. … this is just a political exercise,” Kennedy said.

“Bring your Yuletide carols and all that stuff here because we may be singing to each other,” South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters last week.

Just a few hours before McConnell declared that the deal in the works was broadly appealing, McCarthy told House Republicans that he was against the spending package. Top congressional negotiators announced Tuesday evening that an agreement has been reached for a framework that should allow lawmakers to complete a sweeping full-year government funding package.

As Congress wraps up its work to fund federal agencies, McCarthy and McConnell are on a collision course, underscoring the political force in their conferences that the two will have to work through next year when the GOP takes power in the House.

Asked if he were aware that McConnell felt blindsided by McCarthy’s Fox News rejoinder, Thune said: “Yeah,” while adding: “I think he’s reflecting what’s happening in the House, and he’s, as best I can (tell), trying to make sure he’s representative of the views of the House Republicans.”

McCarthy made similar comments during a press conference last week in an attempt to win over conservatives who are still undecided about voting for him for speaker.

The Senate and the House of Representatives have tense relations because the Senate can only take a few minutes to approve a bill and the House can approve it in an hour. In the new Congress, McConnell will lead a 49-seat Senate minority while McCarthy will have 222 Republican seats in the House. If McCarthy wins the speakership on January 3, he can only afford to lose four GOP votes to pass legislation along party lines.

From a broader political perspective, it might be in McCarthy’s interest to stand up to the most extreme members of his conference. The path to the GOP majority went through comparatively moderate seats in places like New York that will be most at risk in the 2024 election. And pro-Trump election-denying extremists, like those who are tormenting him now, were mostly rejected by swing-state voters in the midterm elections. The anti-Trump vote was also decisive in the 2018 election when Republicans lost the House and in 2020 when they lost the presidency.

Off the House floor on Tuesday, McCarthy sidestepped a question about McConnell’s support for the emerging funding package and instead pointed his finger back at Democrats.

“Well, my message is to Democrats who want to spend more,” McCarthy said when asked about McConnell. “I wouldn’t be adding more money after all that they compounded on and all that they spent, especially just last year.”

“We’re on defense,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters. We were dealt cards and we are handling them. They were able to increase funding for defense programs and fight the Democrats’ push to raise money for other domestic programs.

Meanwhile, future opportunities for legislative brinksmanship already beckon – presumptive Speaker McCarthy may feel he has no choice than to give into his devil-may-care faction to try to force budget cuts in a new spending deal next fall or the always-perilous debt ceiling negotiations. It would reward voters if the Republicans started their control of the house with a government shutdown.

Even as McCarthy signals his staunch opposition to the massive spending package, some of his critics are complaining about how the process is playing out.

The chairman of the House Freedom Caucus said McConnell is ready to roll the House right now because there is more than trillions of dollars in spending. “Tell me how something changes here. I would be interested to hear, but right now I don’t believe anything will change.

GOP sources say that House leadership is likely to try and block the omnibus bill as well, since they don’t want to extend the one-week spending patch until December 23. Both packages will likely be voted on by McConnell.

“Teams win. The co-chair of the centrist-leaning Main Street Caucus points to McCarthy’s support among the conference as reason for fractured teams losing. “We can’t let a handful hold the conference hostage.”

Any party in American history would have a hard time regaining their power if the GOP took over the House in January. The fight between pro- and anti-Donald Trump would cause the majority to be more volatile.

Democratic Sen. Cory McCarthy and the Biden administration: Why the year-end tussle on the Capitol is important for the economy and the future

Aside from plotting potential retribution, there is also concern among those who support McCarthy over what kind of deals he could be willing to make in order to secure the votes for speaker.

The California Republican is fighting a rearguard battle against members who want to make it easier to eject a sitting speaker and he’s appeasing ex-President Donald Trump’s extremism and that of acolytes like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to save a narrow political power base propping up his dream of running the House.

This is the reason why the current year-end tussle over whether to funding the government for a full year is so important since it could dump a fiscal crisis on the laps of a weak and easily manipulated new.

So showing voters in 2024 that GOP governance addressed key problems like inflation and the economy will be important. But while he has announced he will form a select committee to examine China’s growing threat, which could unite both parties, most of McCarthy’s recent rhetoric has focused on a relentless set of investigations of the Biden administration and conservatives’ interest in impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

McCarthy shrugged off the questions about the comments, saying, “Oh I think she said she was being facetious.” He had said as much when he briefly said that Trump bore responsibility for the worst attack on US democracy in modern times.

McCarthy did not criticize the ex-president for meeting with a white supremacist at a dinner that also featuredYe, the rapper who has made a string of antisemitic remarks. After meeting Biden and other congressional leaders last month, the House Republican leader made a false accusation that Trump had said things he hadn’t before.

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney said that McCarthy saying any bill sponsored by a Republican senator who supports the omnibus bill will be “dead on arrival in the House” is “silliness” on McCarthy’s part.

One thing the California Republican does have going for his dreams of the top job is the fact that there so far is not a strong alternative to his candidacy. The former head of the Freedom Caucus has launched a longshot bid.

As frustration inside the House GOP has grown over a small band of anti-Kevin McCarthy lawmakers, an idea to strike back at the rebellious group has been floated among some Republicans: kicking these members off their committees, according to multiple members involved in the conversations.

It’s unclear, however, whether moderates will actually be willing to follow through with the same hardball tactics often deployed by the far right – especially if it could wind up backfiring for McCarthy. Opposing the rules package, for example, could upend any careful negotiations between McCarthy and his detractors, so GOP sources don’t believe McCarthy’s supporters would ultimately take it down.

The dynamic offers a preview of the tensions between the moderate and MAGA wings that are likely to spill over next year with a razor-thin House majority. The House Republicans who identify as either centrist or part of the GOP governing wing feel supported by the elections in which many extremists candidates failed.

“People need to recognize we don’t need to double down on failed policies and failed candidates,” said Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican. There is a reason that people who are left of center were the most successful during the midterms.

“From a governing perspective, it’s important that Republicans don’t start January 3 by going face down and not having some clarity as to what we’re going to be able to accomplish” GOP Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas told CNN. To demonstrate that the American people trust and confidence they have given to us, we need to hit the ground running and show them that they were correct in giving us a majority.

Gaetz, who had opposed McCarthy as speaker, acknowledged the reality of a narrowly divided House.

“We are in a community of common fate,” he told CNN. “We have to acknowledge that the ship isn’t going anywhere if five people won’t row in that direction. And that’s true on impeachment, it’s true on the speakership vote, it’s true on the budget, it’s true on policy choices.”

The Republican Governance Group, a band of centrist-leaning lawmakers, huddled with McCarthy on Wednesday in order to get a sense of where his head is at, according to lawmakers who attended. During the meeting, they told McCarthy they would have his back and were committed to voting for him on multiple ballots if it comes to that. And they also passed out “O.K.” buttons – which stands for “Only Kevin” – in a joking nod to McCarthy’s opposition.

What do we need to know about the House Freedom Caucus? A representative of Burchett and the governing group at the Capitol Hill

There are some unanswered questions about other deals that are going to be cut and what guarantees are going to be made. “What are you saying?” Womack asked. We have to be careful that we do not give a lot of leverage away.

But one member told CNN they also conveyed concern to McCarthy about restoring the motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. Republicans are concerned that the tool would hamper their ability to govern, because it was constantly used over former Speaker JohnBoehners head.

McCarthy is against the idea, but some sources are saying that he will need to find a compromise or give ground in order to get the votes he needs to become speaker. One of the five individuals who publicly came out against the GOP leader told CNN that the leader has been in continued conversations with many of the Republican conference members.

McCarthy held a meeting to let his members keep discussing rules changes and other concessions even though there is no resolution regarding the motion to leave the chair.

Many members are still trying to preach unity, calling the private deal-making part of the process, and emphasizing that the congress will come together when it starts January 3. The Republican Governance Group sent a letter to their colleagues urging them to unite behind McCarthy.

The congressman from Florida told CNN it shouldn’t be a surprise that republicans are talking about different points of view.

The members from competing groups have a lot of fun with one another. Burchett hosted a Christmas party in his office this week, where all corners of Capitol Hill came together, including some anti-McCarthy lawmakers. Amid the Mountain Dew fountain and “charcuterie plate” consisting of Cheez Whiz and Ritz crackers, Burchett at one point rode the skateboard of Gaetz’s wife.

According to the Utah Republican, who is part of the governing wing, there was consensus on a lot of things and they wouldn’t have a problem next year.

“I’ve said this over and over again: there is not this, like, enormous amount of drama,” Moore told CNN. I met with a number of House Freedom Caucus members to discuss what we agree on. It is an enormous amount.

“This is a lot of unfinished business this year that they would have to take care of next year and I know from having been over there, that wouldn’t be easy, especially when you’ have a narrow majority.”

We are enduring the silly season. That is done for most of us after we are elected. But he’s running for speaker of the House, so the silliness is still evident,” he said.

Sen. Pat Brown: On the House GOP Go-round of the 1995-2012 Public Works and Social Security Reform Act (Summary)

Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is based in Washington, DC. He was a senior policy adviser to the Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on Twitter. The views he expresses in this piece are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Congress hopes that it can have the omnibus bill passed by Christmas, as it was released Monday night.

Devotees of good government have a lot to complain about. Forcing lawmakers to vote certain bills in their entirety has become a crutch that Congress relies on too often.

Republicans won’t want to hear it but the product will help them in the long run by eliminating a potential stumbling block.

13 House members, including rock-ribbed fiscal conservative and America First poster boy Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, released a letter excoriating Senate GOP leadership for supporting this assault on the American people They promised to oppose “any legislative priority of those senators who vote for this bill – including the Republican leader,” and that sentiment was endorsed via tweet by McCarthy.

But Republicans don’t have to embrace the lame-duck deal to appreciate the silver lining of something getting passed, as ugly as it may seem. Without an appropriations deal, the federal government would have been facing a temporary extension of funding that would expire early next year. It was a good opportunity for the firebrand caucus of the GOP to make their mark in the House majority by provoking a government shutdown.

In 1995- 1996 and 2012 Republican-led shutdowns resulted in poor polling for GOP leaders, and did not achieve any meaningful policy change. There’s very little reason to believe this go-round would be any different, and some members may be secretly breathing a sigh of relief to have that taken off the table.

While Republicans have plenty to complain about the process, they also have reason to feel a little frustrated with how some negotiations that could have provided meaningful assistance to parents and families didn’t take place.

The lack of a work requirement in the expansion of the Child Tax Credit made it impractical for Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and many other Republicans to support it. But for most of the year, the White House’s stated bargaining position was that CTC expansion had to be done with no work requirements, only to reverse course at the last minute.

Democrats should have been talking to Republican senators over the past year about a deal on the CTC, since each senator has proposed versions of pro-family tax reform. The upcoming era of divided governance may allow the Democrats to explore areas of common ground.

Another common-sense initiative fell victim to partisan squabbling, this time legislation that would have brought clarity to the legal landscape around workplace accommodations for expectant mothers. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which was endorsed by conservative pro-life groups and left-leaning women’s organizations, got caught up in questions about whether business could be forced to provide benefits to women who choose abortion.

Republicans will take no glee in fighting against the $575 million grants for family planning/reproductive health, as they see it as an example of pork barrel spending.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything good in the omnibus. Aside from the big-ticket items that keep the government functioning, Congress included funding for a task force and hotline on maternal health, and ordered a study on the impact of tech use on teen mental health outcomes.

They also increased funding for the child care block grant, reauthorized the evidence-based maternal and early Childhood home visiting program, and extended funding for low-income mothers for up to a year after birth under Medicaid.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/21/opinions/republicans-omnibus-spending-deal-brown/index.html

Avoiding Self-inflicted Wounds in a Democratic Unified Congress: The Case of 21 Sens. Voting to Advance the Voting Deal

For now, avoiding at least one self-inflicted wound may be the best parting gift Republicans could ask for from an era of unified Democratic control. The fact that 21 GOP senators voted to advance the deal suggests that many in the upper chamber are aware of that.