How the debt limit played into House speaker battle

By Joseph Farah

Here we go again …

“The messy, drawn-out battle over electing the next speaker is raising the danger of a debt-limit crisis later this year, lawmakers in both parties warn,” said The Hill.

Think about what the sentence suggests.

As a long-time advocate of employing the debt-limit to maintaining budget sanity, I’ve seen it spun to make it seem as the opposite – frequently. It’s about to happen again.

“Congress has successfully avoided a debt-limit crisis since 2011, which was also the first year of a new House GOP majority,” The Hill reminds us. It would be more accurate to say 2011 was the last time the debt limit played a real role in the governing of America.

If ever there were a time for it to be reengaged, it is now.

We should not be alarmed by it.

It must be understood.

The debt limit is the method used by responsible members of government to keep tabs on spending.

Do you want your federal government to be fiscally reined in, or not?

Every responsible person should.

Joe Biden does not. Mitch McConnell does not. Kevin McCarthy does not.

As always, we need to be aware of when the next debt limit is reached.

The Treasury Department won’t say exactly when the debt limit will expire, but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates it will need to be raised sometime after July.

This was the key metric used by those Republicans who’ve blocked McCarthy as speaker of the House. They want to use the debt limit as leverage to enact major spending reforms – something that Senate Democrats and House Democrats have dismissed as a non-starter over the past decade.

“Us 20 want changes, and we’re going to stay here until we get it,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said Wednesday. “Could McCarthy all of a sudden morph into a fiscal conservative? We’ll see. Is he willing to shut the government down rather than raise the debt ceiling? That’s a non-negotiable item.”

A group of seven conservatives opposed to McCarthy’s bid to become speaker circulated a “Dear Colleague” letter last month demanding that the next speaker “commit to not raising the debt ceiling without a concrete plan to cap spending and operate under a budget that balances in 10 years.”

McCarthy met with a group of his conservative opponents Wednesday evening in an effort to persuade them to flip their votes, and he had some success in two votes Friday.

Bloomberg breathlessly reported, “One of the main demands of the GOP faction McCarthy had to negotiate with was using the nation’s debt limit to try to force deep cuts in the federal budget.”

The news site reports Pennsylvania Republican Scott Perry as saying, “There will be no clean increase in the debt ceiling.”

This was an effective squeeze play against McCarthy. We’ll see if he follows through with the deal come summer.

The debt limit is still our best friend for fighting the crazy spending of the Democrats.

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Joseph Farah

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies, including his latest, "The Gospel in Every Book of the Old Testament." Before launching WND as the first independent online news outlet in 1997, he served as editor in chief of major market dailies including the legendary Sacramento Union. Read more of Joseph Farah's articles here.


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