After GOP hypocrisy, Democrats see opening to abolish debt ceiling

Washington Post

12-07-2025

For someone who hates debt, Rep. Tim Burchett made a remarkable acknowledgment after voting this month for a massive bill that included a $5 trillion hike to the nation's credit card limit.
'I feel like we ought to just do away with the debt ceiling. I mean, it's a joke,' the Tennessee Republican told reporters July 3.
Now in his fourth term, Burchett had just cast his first vote for legislation that increased the limit on the Treasury's borrowing authority, something dozens of archconservatives vowed to never do. But they surrendered in an anticlimax to a roiling debate that for years defined GOP lawmakers after President Donald Trump demanded they include the hike as part of the just-passed massive legislation that covered everything from tax cuts to border security to defense spending.
Of the almost 275 Republicans in the House and Senate, all but five supported the 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act,' as Trump named it. Of those five, only two Republicans cited the debt ceiling as a reason to oppose the legislation. The bill itself is no model of fiscal restraint: The national debt is expected to jump by $3.4 trillion over 10 years, per one estimate by the Congressional Budget Office.
Current law sets limits on how much total debt the U.S. government can hold, a little more than $36 trillion. Under the latest hike, that will rise to more than $41 trillion. Annual deficits — the difference between how much the federal government spends each year and how much it takes in from taxes and other sources — are now so large and interest payments so high that such a large lift in overall debt will last only about two-and-a-half years before the new ceiling is hit.
Now that Republicans have crossed this red line, some conservatives like Burchett admit that hypocrisy is everywhere on the issue, and that the debt ceiling is no longer a useful tool for fiscal restraint.
'It's a worthless piece of paper. It's a relic of a bygone era,' he told reporters.
Democrats now see an opening to change the rules governing how much money the Treasury can borrow.
'This is the de facto end, at long last, of the debt ceiling as a political issue on the right,' Rep. Brendan Boyle (Pennsylvania), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in an interview this week.
Such a boast would have seemed foolhardy two years ago, when a debt limit showdown between President Joe Biden and House Republicans went down to the wire and ended after modest concessions from the administration.
But Boyle, who is a leader in the effort to get rid of the debt ceiling altogether, is already mapping out a negotiation in late 2027, when he hopes Democrats will be in the House majority and he will be the point person for his caucus when the next debt ceiling standoff is expected to hit.
In that scenario, Trump would be heading into his final year in office as a lame duck looking to burnish his legacy and certainly trying to avoid a calamitous debt default that would tank the economy.
'The only thing I would support is a permanent resolution of this,' Boyle said. He has introduced legislation that is complicated but ultimately does not allow Congress to hold Washington hostage over the debt limit.
Supporters of the debt law see it as one of the only ways to force lawmakers to at least ponder the burden of a growing national debt, and many archconservatives still support keeping the limit.
'I disagree, with all due respect to Tim, he's a good man. But the debt ceiling's important, we ought to hold on to it,' Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a leader of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, told reporters.
But to critics like Boyle, the risk-reward scale tilts far too close to risk. The potential for breaching the limit threatens a default that would lead independent financial analysts to downgrade the Treasury's credit rating and potentially erode the full faith and credit that the U.S. dollar provides for global finances.
The United States is the only developed nation to have such a quirky law, which started during World War I and was formalized in 1939. Over the next 15 or so years, the national debt fluctuated between $300 billion and $275 billion, fueled by spending on wars. After a real scare of breaching the limit in 1979, the House adopted a rule that made increasing the debt limit a perfunctory vote upon approving the budget.
But then politics interfered.
After the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and the Great Recession, the tea party movement rose up against government spending. When Republicans took the House majority in 2011, they turned the debt ceiling into a standoff against President Barack Obama, demanding a dramatic scaling back of his early agenda.
The conflict resulted in one of the only genuine efforts to truly rein in spending via the debt ceiling law. Obama considered new cuts to entitlement programs that his Democratic base would oppose, while House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) entertained the type of tax hikes on the rich that the GOP base loathed.
Instead, amid rebellion on both sides, they adopted a budget framework that indiscriminately reduced future increases in federal agency budgets by $2 trillion over the next decade.
Ever since then, fights over the debt limit have served little purpose, each side playing a familiar role. The ceiling gets raised every time, but not before partisan howling and dramatics that threaten to send the nation's fiscal health spiraling.
And those fights created debt ceiling puritans such as Burchett, who hails from a rural East Tennessee district that has favored the GOP presidential candidate by at least 30 points in five straight elections.
Since arriving in Congress in January 2019, Burchett had voted against the first four laws that raised the debt limit. Having spent 15 years in the state legislature, he liked how Tennessee was 'constitutionally bound' to have a balanced budget and wanted Congress to do the same.
'I don't like debt. I'm from Tennessee, we're a debt-free state,' Burchett told reporters a few days before a May 2023 debt vote.
But Trump, a real estate developer familiar with debt and bankruptcy, never liked the national debt limit and once proposed eliminating it, before GOP leaders walked him back from that position.
Once he reclaimed the presidency in November, Trump told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and other GOP leaders to take care of that issue so that his presidency wasn't handcuffed by those restraints.
Rather than handling it in a bipartisan manner, Republicans decided to tuck one of the largest debt increases ever into the tax-and-border legislation. And they used parliamentary rules to pass some budget matters entirely with Republican votes, not needing to clear a 60-vote filibuster hurdle in the Senate and allowing them to avoid making any concessions to Democrats in a bipartisan bill.
For budget policy wonks, this was a Nixon-goes-to-China moment.
Four years ago, as Democrats pursued their own sweeping policy agenda, some encouraged Biden and their leaders to take this unilateral approach, to avoid any potential GOP effort to use the debt ceiling as a political hostage.
But senior Democrats were afraid of the political optics of a several-trillion-dollar debt hike when they were pursuing an agenda of roughly the same size. So they spent part of 2021 and all spring 2023 haggling with Republicans to boost the debt limit.
But Democrats always overestimated the public's interest in runaway government spending, and who would get the blame for it. The bigger the U.S. debt got, the more each party shared the blame, and the less it became a campaign issue.
When Trump started his presidency, the debt limit hit $20 trillion. The new law extends that limit to about $41 trillion.
One study of the 2022 midterm elections showed that just $9 million worth of ads mentioned 'debt,' 'debt ceiling' or 'debt limit,' a minuscule fraction of the roughly $8 billion that went into political advertising during those elections.
This time, Trump was not going to make the same political mistake as Biden and Democrats. Deficit hawks like Roy and Burchett objected to Trump's suggestion of having Biden sign a debt increase into law on his way out, but that just led to Trump demanding Republicans fall in line and boost the debt limit on their own several months later.
Roy acknowledged that, while he voted for the overarching legislation, he did not like increasing the debt limit. He sheepishly compared his powers to his standing as one member in a 435-member House and 100-member Senate competing against the executive and judiciary branches.
'I wouldn't have increased the debt ceiling $5 trillion. But, you know, I'm one-435th, of one-half, of one-third. So that's my voting power,' he said.
Burchett believes Congress needs to work on debts and deficits outside of this quirky law, but lays some blame at the feet of voters who voice conflicting concerns.
'They say, 'You all don't have any restraint,' and then,' he said, 'they say, 'Hey, can you give me that bridge or that ballfield in my district?''
And Boyle is lying in wait, hoping to have the chance to end this battle, once and for all.
'Finally, we can bury this thing,' he said.