The Washington Post is gaslighting you on the debt limit
Conn Carroll
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President Joe Biden and his allies at the Washington Post are in a tough spot. They assumed for months that House Republicans would fail to pass legislation that raised the debt limit, thus requiring Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to step in and find 10 Republican votes for a clean debt limit hike.
But then, House Republicans passed legislation that raises the debt limit. And so Biden and the Democrats are in a bit of a jam. They don’t want to negotiate with Republicans on the debt limit, so they need their friends in the media to make it seem like such an event is without precedent. So the Washington Post rides to Biden’s rescue.
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“Previously, Republicans have raised the debt ceiling without issuing demands,” the Washington Post reports. “Three times, they addressed the borrowing cap under President Donald Trump without demanding fiscal reforms. Each time, Democrats serving in the minority also supplied their votes in a bid to avert a crisis.”
This is completely disingenuous. Of course Republicans didn’t issue demands to Trump — he was the leader of their party. And while it is technically true that Democrats “supplied their votes in a bid to avert a crisis,” what the Washington Post very dishonestly leaves out is that Democrats refused to give Trump a clean debt limit hike and extracted significant concessions from him in negotiations.
Just look at this New Yorker headline from September 2017: “How Democrats Rolled Trump on the Debt Ceiling.”
Doesn’t sound very clean to me.
The New Yorker reported: “For weeks, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, had been plotting a strategy to use the debt-ceiling vote to extract concessions from Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans. … The Democrats held fast as the Republicans dropped their request to twelve months and then to six months. Mnuchin argued that the financial markets needed a long-term deal. Trump cut him off and abruptly sided with Schumer and Pelosi on their three-month request.”
That 2017 debt limit deal ended up including $15 billion in additional spending demanded by the Democrats. So no, there was nothing clean about that.
Fast forward to July 2019, and Democrats again used the debt limit as leverage to secure concessions from Trump. This time, they won $324 billion in new spending and the end of the spending caps in the Budget Control Act. It was a huge victory for Democrats. It was also absolutely not a clean debt limit hike.
As the Congressional Research Service noted, “Some commentators have claimed that contentious debt limit episodes are a recent phenomenon or that ‘clean’ debt limit increases were once the norm. Debt policy, however, has been a divisive issue since the beginning of American government and has often been linked with other policy decisions.”
So don’t believe Biden or his allies at the Washington Post for a second when they falsely claim that “clean” debt limit hikes are the norm. The debt limit has always been a point of contention used to extract policy concessions. Biden and his allies at the Washington Post may not like this fact, but they should at least acknowledge the truth.