House GOP steers clear of popular entitlements in debt ceiling fight
David M. Drucker
If House Republicans are going to use their new majority to rein in a $31.4 trillion federal debt that exploded during the coronavirus pandemic, they are going to have to go where the money is and convince voters to follow.
So far, they do not appear to be doing either.
Popular social safety net programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — are roughly two-thirds of annual federal expenditures and the biggest drivers of the federal debt. But responding to Democratic claims leading up to the 2022 midterm elections that entitlement programs would be on the chopping block if deficit-conscious Republicans won the House and Senate majorities, GOP incumbents and challenger candidates promised otherwise and labeled the attacks fallacious.
A couple of weeks into fresh control of the House, Republicans are giving no indication they plan to vindicate the Democratic Party’s campaign messaging from last year. (Senate Republicans, still in the minority, have less power to control government spending.)
“What we have been very clear about is we’re not going to touch the benefits that are going to people relying on the benefits under Social Security and Medicare,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), a leading conservative and fiscal hawk, said in a Jan. 8 CNN interview.
“But we all have to be honest about sitting at the table and figuring out how we’re going to make those work, how we’re going to deal with defense spending, and how we’re going to deal with nondefense discretionary spending,” Roy added.
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Asked about Medicare and Social Security last week during a news conference, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) also suggested Republicans have no intention of trimming the healthcare and pension programs so well regarded by seniors. This cohort is a reliable vote in nearly every election.
“The one thing I will tell you as Republicans, we will always protect Medicare and Social Security,” McCarthy told reporters. “We will protect that for the next generation going forward. But we are going to scrutinize every single dollar spent.”
House Republicans might not have settled on which government sectors the spending cuts and reforms should come from — pruning the Pentagon’s budget amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an escalating rivalry with China in the Pacific also appears a nonstarter. But they are signaling possible hardball strategies to leverage their razor-thin majority to squeeze significant reductions in as-yet undetermined discretionary spending items out of President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats.
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One game plan involves withholding votes to fund the government before fiscal 2024 gets underway Oct. 1. The other involves withholding votes to raise the federal, statutory borrowing limit — the debt ceiling — once the Treasury Department has exhausted extraordinary measures to ensure the United States pays its bills on time. That is expected to occur at some point in the next four to six months. However, there is a problem with these tactics.
Previous Republican majorities have tried both in the past — and voters have rejected both every time.
“The strategy can’t just be hoping that Democrats blink first. In the past, Republicans have assumed that eventually the Democrats would fold. But it turns out they’re not going to compromise — they don’t feel like they have to,” said Alex Conant, a Republican operative and founding partner of Firehouse Strategies, a government relations firm in Washington.
“If Republicans are going to go down this path, they have to have a very clear sense of how it plays out,” Conant added.
In the mid-1990s, House and Senate Republicans used a government shutdown in a bid to pressure President Bill Clinton to cut spending. He balked, voters sided with him, and the GOP was forced to back down.
In the early 2010s, House Republicans made multiple attempts to force President Barack Obama to slash federal expenditures, using standoffs over government funding and the debt ceiling. Voters sided with Obama and the Democrats every time, leaving the GOP no choice but to acquiesce. Biden remembers both Republican missteps quite well. The Democrat was a senator during the Clinton administration and vice president in the Obama White House.
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That’s why the president, in his initial comments regarding the upcoming fight with Republicans over hiking the debt ceiling, is drawing a line in the sand, vowing to offer zero concessions to the House GOP in exchange for their votes to ensure the Treasury can pay its bills.
“They’re fiscally demented,” Biden said Monday during an event celebrating the holiday-birthday of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “They don’t quite get it.”
Naomi Lim contributed to this report.