Shortly after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his Democratic counterparts announced a bipartisan deal to prevent a government shutdown at midnight on Saturday, the MAGA movement tore it apart and sent the federal government hurtling towards a holiday shutdown.
Although many far-right Republicans grumbled from the get-go, Johnson’s problem really began when billionaire Elon Musk launched into a thread on the social media app formerly known as Twitter excoriating the details of the bill. Although there were many provisions of questionable merit attached to the continuing resolution that would keep the government operating until next March, Musk’s thread was full of misinformation and falsehoods — a problem that has always plagued the platform and become even worse since he took ownership of it in 2022.
President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance then issued a joint statement announcing their opposition to the legislation, effectively killing any chance it had of passing the Republican-controlled House with less than 48 hours to prevent a government shutdown. It’s worth remembering that the last time Republicans had unified control of the U.S. House, Senate, and Presidency, the federal government shut down three times in just one year — more than any other year in the preceding four decades. If Donald Trump and his billionaire backer Elon Musk are so quick to undermine legislation negotiated by their own party’s House speaker, who has a far narrower majority to work with than his predecessor did in 2018, the country is likely to be in for uniquely high levels of government dysfunction over the next two years.
But interestingly, in a statement that briefly echoed many of the critiques from their right-wing allies, Trump and Vance focused on a new demand that had never even been discussed in negotiations: raising or repealing the federal debt ceiling that is set to go back into effect next year. Trump’s subsequent justifications are actually quite reasonable: the debt ceiling doesn’t prevent the federal government from approving spending more money than it takes in through tax collections. Rather, it limits how much the government can spend paying bills it has already incurred. Failure to raise the debt ceiling would result in the United States defaulting on its obligations, which would likely cause a financial crisis. Accordingly, the ceiling is always raised, and our national debt continues to mount. Trump says the debt ceiling is either “a catastrophe or meaningless” — and he’s actually right.
But during the Biden administration, Trump repeatedly called on Republicans not to raise the debt ceiling, even though his critiques were as true then as they are now. So what changed? Trump likely does not want a debt-ceiling debate next year because, even though the debt ceiling doesn’t have substantive effects on our debt, it usually triggers a national conversation about our unsustainable fiscal trajectory. And next year, Trump’s top agenda items — most notably extending and expanding up on his 2017 tax cuts – would make that trajectory even worse. Effectively, Trump is a broken clock, and the two times of day he is right are when it serves his own interests.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has likely seen through this ploy and rejected supporting any attempt to tie a debt ceiling increase to the continuing resolution. With many House Republicans having long opposed any debt-ceiling increase, and the party having a narrow eight-seat majority, it is unlikely any bill can pass without at least some blessing from House Democrats.
If Democrats want to meet Trump’s demand but still hold him accountable for the costs of his budget-busting tax policies, one option would be to extend the debt ceiling suspension through the end of Trump’s term on January 20, 2029. But they could include a poison pill: If the president signs into law a deficit-increasing reconciliation bill, the debt ceiling suspension automatically ends on that date. This provision could not be undone through the reconciliation process that circumvents a Senate filibuster, meaning Republicans would be forced to choose among three options: 1) fully offsetting the cost of extending partisan tax cuts, 2) working with Democrats on a bipartisan tax reform bill through regular order instead of the reconciliation process, 3) triggering a debt ceiling debate that reminds the American people Republican tax policies are responsible for worsening our debt situation.
Another option would be to replace the status quo with a better mechanism for controlling debt, such as the Responsible Budgeting Act sponsored by Reps. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) and Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.). Their approach would allow Congress to suspend the debt ceiling automatically upon the adoption of a concurrent budget resolution by the House and Senate, or allow the president to suspend the debt ceiling for a period of time if he submits a credible deficit reduction plan to Congress. That plan, as well as alternatives with significant bipartisan support or those crafted by the relevant committees of jurisdiction, would then receive expedited consideration in Congress. This process, or another like it that negates the need for regular votes to raise the debt ceiling, would be a better way to promote fiscal discipline and hold the governing party responsible for the costs of its agenda than threatening to throw the country into a financial crisis every few years.
Raising or reforming the debt ceiling is an admirable policy goal — one that even Trump’s political opponents should be willing to partner with him on in the next Congress. But his decision to sabotage a bipartisan deal at the eleventh hour and risk triggering a government shutdown just to ease the scrutiny of his budget-busting agenda next year is likely a harbinger of the chaos to come next year when Trump officially returns to power. If Democrats are going to give Trump the win now, they should do so in a way that advances responsible fiscal policy, not budget-busting tax cuts.
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