Congressional leaders have reached a deal on the politically vexing challenge of raising the Treasury Department’s borrowing limit. The Senate will soon vote on a House-passed measure, which sets up a future vote to raise the debt limit. Once President Biden signs the bill into law, the deal will take the threat of a government default off the table, at least until after next year’s midterm elections.
Earlier this fall, 11 Senate Republicans joined every Democrat to block a GOP filibuster of a measure to raise the debt ceiling until now. Former president Donald Trump and some of Republican senators attacked Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for cooperating with Democrats to lift the cap, and McConnell vowed Republicans wouldn’t help out again.
Few believed his threat. Now McConnell and Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) have come up with a one-time plan to enable Senate Democrats to raise the debt limit by a simple majority vote, with no possibility of a Republican filibuster. They had to work out the details behind closed doors and throw in a more popular provision to give Republican members of Congress a plausible excuse for voting for the one-time plan. While no one has voted on the one-time procedural amalgam yet, it looks like the United States won’t default on its debts — for now.
Here’s what happened.
Improv, Senate style
The deal amounts to a one-time, temporary ban on filibustering a resolution to raise the debt limit. To do that, they’re using a decades-old Senate practice: Enact a law that allows expedited treatment of another bill, protecting the latter from a filibuster.
The contemporary Senate occasionally uses these fast-track, filibuster-proof procedures. Past versions have done such things as expediting resolutions related to war powers, weapons sales, trade agreements and emergency declarations. This particular agreement is time-limited, which makes it unusual, and is more like the way the House routinely handles difficult floor votes: By majority vote, the House typically adopts a “special rule” that dictates how and when the House will debate, amend and vote on a pending measure.
Here’s what these special agreements have in common: Even minority-party senators are periodically willing to temporarily set aside their chamber’s supermajority rules to enable the majority party to pass urgent measures — while keeping their own hands out of it.
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Avoiding blame
In the fall, when McConnell threatened not to cooperate on raising the debt limit, he told Democrats they should write a new filibuster-proof reconciliation bill and raise the debt limit without Republican help. But Republicans could not force Democrats to use the rules that way. And Democrats didn’t believe his threat.
Why not? Because Democrats knew that Republicans — especially McConnell, with a track record of improvising solutions for raising the debt limit — would not allow the government to default. Both parties want to avoid blame for bad outcomes. Defaulting on U.S. debt risked economic, financial and political debacles that neither party’s leaders — or donors — wanted. Schumer had every reason to negotiate with McConnell, hold out, and expect they would eventually make a deal.
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Watch the closing doors
After Watergate, both the House and Senate adopted a wave of overhauls that broadened lawmakers’ participation on the chamber floors and made it harder for committees to deliberate privately. But rising partisanship over the years has encouraged rank-and-file lawmakers to give party leaders more power to negotiate deals.
House and Senate leaders are quite happy with that, preferring to bargain behind closed doors. Secrecy lets negotiators knit together an entire agreement before shaking hands. As the negotiators’ adage goes, “Nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.” In this case, after other solutions proved unworkable, Senate leaders paired popular measures to delay anticipated cuts to Medicare and other programs with the unpopular workaround for raising the debt cap. After revealing the deal’s details to a fractured Senate Republican conference, GOP leaders spun the agreement as necessary to prevent cuts to Medicare to win Republican support.
Leaders know most voters pay little attention to Capitol Hill’s parliamentary twists and turns. So that partisan messaging will probably suffice to secure enough Senate GOP votes to seal the deal.
No wonder leaders favor procedural gymnastics to evade the filibuster and get stuff done.