President Donald Trump has fiscally conservative Republicans in a serious bind. It began Wednesday, when Trump made the shocking decision to back a Democratic proposal to tie a short-term government spending and debt ceiling extension to Hurricane Harvey relief funding, which likely strengthened the minority’s negotiating…
President Donald Trump has fiscally conservative Republicans in a serious bind.
It began Wednesday, when Trump made the shocking decision to back a Democratic proposal to tie a short-term government spending and debt ceiling extension to Hurricane Harvey relief funding, which likely strengthened the minority’s negotiating position on Congress’s legislative priorities this fall. But Thursday, it was reported that Trump also agreed with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer on a goal to permanently scrap the federal debt ceiling, according to the Washington Post.
Trump confirmed Thursday he discussed the matter the day before during a meeting with Schumer, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, and Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. “For many years, people have been talking about getting rid of [the] debt ceiling altogether, and there are a lot of good reasons to do that, ” the president said before meeting the Kuwaiti emir.
“It complicates things. It’s really not necessary.”
Of course, Republicans have long advocated for balancing the budget and shrinking the federal debt. In the view of many conservatives, making it difficult for Congress to continue its out-of-control spending is not a bug, but a feature. While the debt ceiling is not a spending cap, it is a check on borrowing—something the government has done to the point of amassing $19.8 trillion of debt.
Republican senator Ted Cruz said “of course” the debt ceiling should not be eliminated when asked about it Thursday, per Bloomberg News’s Sahil Kapur .
Trump promised during the presidential campaign that America would balance the books “ fairly quickly ” if he was elected. “We have to straighten out our country, ” he told Sean Hannity in April 2016. But paying off the debt is not exactly at the top of the to-do list for Democrats—with whom Trump agreed on two significant fiscal issues in the span of one meeting.
The news is a horror show to Republicans like House speaker Paul Ryan, who once made his bones in Congress pushing fiscal responsibility as budget chairman. Ryan called the Harvey-debt ceiling plan “ridiculous” just hours before Trump embraced it Wednesday. But his objection Thursday to Trump’s alignment with Schumer on the debt ceiling was demure.
“I won’ t get into a private conversation that we had [at the White House] , but I think there’s a legitimate role for the power of the purse of the Article 1 powers, and that’s something we defend here in Congress, ” Ryan said during a press conference.
