Kevin McCarthy Trolls Democrats For Not Raising Debt Ceiling Before Becoming President

WASHINGTON — Democrats could have raised the debt ceiling while controlling both the House and Senate, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Wednesday, but they refused to do so without good reason. .

“Democrats could have raised the debt ceiling before I became president,” McCarthy said Wednesday. “They already knew the result of the elections. They knew we were taking over.”

Now that Republicans control the House, they have held the debt ceiling hostage by vowing to oppose an increase unless Democrats agree to spending cuts and new “work requirements” on federal safety net programs.

If the two sides do not reach an agreement, then the federal government could default on its debts in the coming weeks, an unprecedented situation that could wreck the financial system and lead to mass layoffs.

McCarthy’s comment that the Democrats could have raised the debt ceiling when they had the chance resonates progressive criticism from the Democrats for ending up in a debt ceiling showdown with the Republicans even though they could see the crisis looming a mile away.

Still, it’s unclear whether Democrats could have raised the debt as easily as McCarthy suggested. Many progressive legislators, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), said last fall that she would be a good idea to raise the debt ceiling before McCarthy wielded the speaker’s mallet. But the legislative path for a limp debt ceiling bill was unclear at the time.

By then, Republicans already had their sights set on using the debt ceiling as leverage and would have opposed efforts to raise, suspend, or remove the ceiling through regular order. The other option for Democrats would have been to use the complicated “budget reconciliation” process, which would allow them to pass the legislation through the Senate with a simple majority vote, without going through a Republican filibuster.

But Democrats would have had to overcome reluctance from their own ranks, such as that of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who said in novemberis, “I don’t think I should go to reconciliation.” This month, Manchin told politician the debt ceiling “should be bipartisan,” though he declined to say definitively whether he would have supported a partisan bill if Democrats had pushed for one, which they apparently did not.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, refrained Wednesday from saying she was sorry Democrats were not act when they had the chance.

“We pushed hard and raised it multiple times because we needed to deal with the debt ceiling right away, while having control of all three bodies,” Jayapal said, referring to the House, Senate and White House. He declined to criticize party leaders for not accepting the suggestion.

As McCarthy put it: “They decided not to raise the debt ceiling even though they thought people should just raise it cleanly.”