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A month after the 2022 midterm elections, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did not seem especially concerned about the upcoming fight over the debt ceiling. “At the risk of sounding patriotic here, you just can’t have the country default,” the Kentucky Republican told NBC News in December. “It just can’t happen.”
A month later, the GOP leader went on to say that the United States “must never default on its debt,” adding: “It never has, it never will.”
The comments were reassuring — and unexpected. McConnell helped pioneer debt-ceiling crises in the recent past, which made it all the more surprising to see the Republican effectively take default off the table.
Four months later, McConnell’s approach has taken a more dangerous turn. The Hill reported:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has signed onto a letter stating he and more than 40 members of the Senate GOP conference will not back “any bill that raises the debt ceiling without substantive spending and budget reforms,” according to sources. The letter is addressed to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and would be McConnell’s clearest statement to date about what he is willing to support to avoid a national default next month when the federal government is projected to run out of money.
The letter was spearheaded by Sen. Mike Lee, but according to The Hill’s report, McConnell “worked behind the scenes to gin up support” for the far-right Utahan’s missive.
The arithmetic, of course, reinforces the scope of the problem: If there’s going to be a legislative solution, it will need the support of both the GOP-led House and the Democratic-led Senate. In the upper chamber, however, any bill will need at least 60 votes to advance.
The Senate Democratic conference has 51 members, which means at least nine Republicans will have to support the at-this-point-entirely-hypothetical legislation. Lee’s letter is intended to make clear that those votes will be a problem: The Senate Republican conference has 49 members, 43 of whom have now said, in writing, that they’ll oppose any solution that lacks “substantive spending and budget reforms.”
The 43 signatories include literally every member of the Senate Republican leadership team.
Even if the six GOP senators who didn’t sign the letter — Maine’s Susan Collins, Missouri’s Josh Hawley, Louisiana’s John Kennedy, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Utah’s Mitt Romney — were to break ranks, and that’s by no means a certainty, the measure wouldn’t have 60 votes.
For now, let’s put aside the fact that many of the GOP senators who signed the letter voted for massive bills during Republican presidencies that added trillions to the national debt. While we’re at it, let’s also temporarily overlook the fact that many of these GOP senators also had no qualms about voting for clean debt ceiling bills during Republican administrations without so much as a hint of “substantive spending and budget reforms.”
Let’s also not dwell on the fact that if these Republican senators were serious about “substantive spending and budget reforms,” they could simply write legislation in pursuit of their goals, sticking to their own country’s legislative system, without threatening Americans with deliberate economic harm.
Let’s instead stress a more immediate problem: As the so-called “x-date” draws closer, Republicans are moving further away from a responsible solution, and closer to pushing the United States toward a default.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that cooler heads will ultimately prevail, and the relevant players will somehow work something out before it’s too late. I wish I could believe that, but all of the evidence keeps pointing in the opposite direction.
Postscript: Defending his letter, Lee argued over the weekend that his party’s threats have merit because “our economy is in free fall.” One day earlier, the nation’s unemployment rate matched a 54-year low.