Lawmakers propose a change in the Senate rules specifying that the filibuster, a 60-vote threshold needed to cut off debate on a piece of legislation, does not apply to the debt ceiling.
Instead, Democrats say, any rise in the debt ceiling should require a simple majority of 51 votes. For such a carve out to be enacted all 50 Senate Democrats would need to back the change.
At the moment, the proposal has only garnered the backing of a handful of lawmakers (Washington Times).
The parliamentarian has already said that Democrats can use reconciliation to raise the debt limit, so why won’t they do it? The Wall Street Journal editorial board gave a good explanation of why the Democrats may avoid this route.
Mr. Biden gave that game away when he was asked Monday why Democrats aren’t using reconciliation. “There is a process” that “would require literally up to hundreds of votes,” Mr. Biden explained. “It’s unlimited number of votes having nothing directly to do with the debt limit; it could be everything from Ethiopia to anything else that has nothing to do with the debt limit. And it’s fraught with all kinds of potential danger for a miscalculation, and it would have to happen twice.”
In other words, Mr. Biden admits that Democrats could raise the limit via reconciliation, but then they’d also have to take difficult votes on many issues on the Senate floor. Some of those votes might be unpopular. Mr. Biden is admitting that the reason is political—that Democrats want Republicans to spare them from having to take those tough votes (WSJ).
No comments:
Post a Comment