Congress just went through one wrenching debt ceiling increase, and will have to go through another sometime in 2018 that will involve more fighting over spending and borrowing, and more tense votes for Republicans.
But one House Democrat is bringing back an idea to get around this problem that seems to surface every 18 months or so.
Under a bill from Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., the House wouldn’t have to vote on the debt ceiling ever again.
Welch is proposing the resurrection of the so-called Gephardt rule. Former Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., invented the procedure in 1979, which allowed the House to automatically approve an increase in the debt ceiling without having to vote on it, a change that would help Republicans in particular avoid an uncomfortable vote.
Under the process, passage of the annual budget that outlines spending for the next fiscal year would trigger the automatic passage of a bill to raise the debt ceiling to accommodate the anticipated need for more borrowing. A House bill raising the debt ceiling to a new level would automatically move to the Senate, without requiring a vote in the House. The Senate would then have to vote.
Members such as Welch favor a return to that mechanism because it re-links congressional decisions to spend money with the need for Congress to raise the borrowing ceiling.
Today, he said, it’s too easy for Congress to pass huge spending bills, and then hem and haw later over whether to facilitate that spending by allowing more government borrowing.
“Hypocrisy 101 around here is vote for the spending, but vote against the debt ceiling,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Welch may be in good company. The debt ceiling vote tends to be awkward for Republicans these days, because it forces so many of them to vote in favor of piling on more debt to the $20 trillion the U.S. has already racked up.
President Trump himself indicated a willingness to explore the idea of getting around the votes. He struck a deal with Democrats in September to suspend the debt ceiling for three months, instead of the 18-month period that Republicans wanted, and said after that deal that maybe the process isn’t needed at all.
“For many years, people have been talking about getting rid of the debt ceiling altogether, and there are a lot of good reasons to do that,” Trump said. “So, certainly, that is something that could be discussed. We even discussed it at the meeting we had discussed.”
Welch’s bill wouldn’t get rid of the debt ceiling, but he agreed it could be a sort of middle ground that would eliminate painful House votes on the debt ceiling.
“I think it does,” Welch said when asked if his idea might have any life in the current Congress. “It’s a middle ground between retaining the debt ceiling and abolishing it.”
He’s likely to face opposition from Republicans, who say the awkward debt ceiling votes forces lawmakers to think about how much money the federal government is spending and borrowing. But Welch argues that Congress can cut spending when it needs to, and that today, too many lawmakers are using the debt ceiling as a chance to push for their own pet issues, and in doing so, put the nation’s credit at risk.
“We’ve got an element in the House that sees the debt ceiling as political leverage to get their point of view,” he said. “When we’ve been near default, we’ve seen a drop in our credit rating … and it costs taxpayers money to deal with that. That’s all self-inflicted harm.”
