When it comes to raising the debt limit, the White House keeps insisting on “no negotiations,” a line President Joe Biden will likely repeat Tuesday in his State of the Union speech — in stark contrast to his own decades-long record.
It’s not just that, as vice president, he led such negotiations time and again, calling them a “normal political battle” and saying “my way or the highway” is “no way to govern.”
Heck, during his decades in the Senate, Biden proudly voted against raising the limit nine times — with explanations like “I refuse to be associated with the policies that brought us to this point” (March 2006).
Fact is, Democrats and Republicans have both used the need to raise the limit as a way to wring concessions from presidents of the other party; Dems bragged about what Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer got from Donald Trump back in 2017, just six years ago.
Democrats usually work the potential crisis to get more spending; Republicans, to get less. And with the national debt having doubled and redoubled in just the past few years, it’s hard to see why the GOP’s wrong to insist on some restraint now.
Not passing any debt-limit hike would indeed be a disaster, but that’s why the White House needs to stop playing chicken and cut a deal. After all, the nation’s only up against the limit now because the prez and his allies goosed the debt with $5 trillion or so in new unfunded spending these last two years.
As Biden himself said in 2011, “grown men and women” need to “learn that they have to have compromise” to avoid putting Uncle Sam in default.