Sen. Jeff Sessions on Thursday ripped the bipartisan deal on the debt ceiling and the budget as a recipe for piling on more than $1 trillion in new debt by the time President Obama leaves office.
“It erases that debt limit until March of 2017, allowing for approximately $1.5 trillion more to be added to our debt of $18.4 trillion now, in two years,” Sessions said on the Senate floor. The actual debt ceiling is around $18.1 trillion.
He said that unlike in past years, the controversial deal that the Senate will vote on by Friday doesn’t increase the debt ceiling to some new, higher level. Instead, he said, it suspends the debt ceiling entirely, allowing the government to borrow as much as it wants until March 2017.
It’s the fourth time in the last few years that the debt ceiling has been suspended, and it’s the longest suspension so far, one that will last nearly a year and a half.
“This is a very unwise process,” Sessions said. “It was done last time, should not be done in the future, that raises it to a date in the future, and indicates, in effect, it’s as much debt as Congress or the president wants to add in that time is approved.”
“We don’t even know the amount,” he continued. “So this is a covert, a clever way of raising the debt ceiling without having to engage in a real discussion of Washington’s runaway spending problem.”
Sessions also rejected attempts by other members to say anyone who wants time to read the deal and propose better ideas is in favor of shutting down the government.
“They can bluster and they can huff and puff, but I say the arguments that I’m going to make in opposition to this are bricks of truth,” he said. “And this house will not fall down and they will not be able to sustain a charge that somehow we have bad motives by objecting to what’s set about here.”
“At its core, this deal with President Obama provides what President Obama has demanded throughout,” he said.
Despite Sessions’ protest, the Senate was expected to advance the debt ceiling deal in a vote late Thursday night or early Friday morning. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., spoke on the floor after Sessions and had similar complaints, but acknowledged that the vote would go on, and that senators are powerless to stop it.
Paul said Wednesday night that he would make an effort to stop the bill, but under Senate rules, the procedural vote cannot be blocked once called for by Senate leaders.
