Even as President Joe Biden appears to have pushed off reaching the next debt limit until 2025, top Democrats on Capitol Hill say what he really needs to do is what he should have done last fall: Come out in favor of a drastic change to strip Congress of this power forever.
Given the current math in the chamber, every senator in the Democratic Caucus would need to support such a change. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he couldn’t get votes from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin or Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who continues to caucus with Democrats, despite leaving the party.
But Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan Boyle — along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others — told CNN that this time around was a breaking point.
After years of obsessing mostly on his own over changing the debt limit, racking up trivia like how the process was an inadvertent fluke of World War I, Boyle said he started feeling the change three weeks ago, when he stood up after a presentation about expected cuts at a dinner of 50 House Democrats and pleaded: “We absolutely have to resolve here and now, this is the last time we go through this craziness.”
Boyle, a longtime and committed Biden ally, said he wasn’t expecting the loud round of applause that night, or the steady stream of colleagues who have come up to him on the House floor since asking to sign on to his bill, but he’s glad to have it, even as White House spokesperson Michael Kikukawa ducked a firm answer on whether Biden would support the change. The president’s focus, Kikukawa said, remains preventing default, and “other options are a question for another day.”
Originally Boyle backed eliminating the debt limit entirely. But over the years, he refined the proposal in an attempt to broaden its appeal, and his most recent bill gives the administration the authority through the Treasury Department to raise the debt limit, while retaining Congress’s ability to override that decision if it wants to actively force the issue.
Several swing district Democrats, though, told CNN that they were wary of supporting a change, calling the debt limit authority an important check on the presidency and on spending, despite their opposition to how it was used this time.
The biggest problem in making a change, Boyle said, is probably attention span – for all the people who’ve been coming up to him lately to stay committed through whatever will come over next year’s elections, and possibly much longer until Democrats again have the power they didn’t use last year.
“Human beings have a tendency to forget. This has been such a torturous experience for my Democratic colleagues that I hope they will not forget,” Boyle said. “However you voted on this deal, the one thing we need to be fully united behind is the next time we are in charge, we need to never again be placed in this situation.”
