Flip-flops the norm on debt limit
Politicians vote based on who holds presidency
WASHINGTON – In the battle to raise the debt ceiling, politics usually trumps principle.
How else to explain the 180-degree turns that lawmakers of both parties have made in congressional debt ceiling votes since 2002?
President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., the biggest supporters today for boosting the debt limit, voted against it in 2006.
“The fact that we’re here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” then-Sen. Obama of Illinois said on the Senate floor in March 2006. “It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., voted to increase the debt limit seven times from 2002 to 2008, when Republican George W. Bush was president. But since Obama took office, McConnell has voted against it three times.
Even McConnell’s budget-cutting colleague, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, voted for stand-alone debt limit increases in 2002 and 2004, raising the debt limit to $6.4 trillion and $8.2 trillion.
Dozens of other lawmakers have made similar flip-flops. In fact, they’ve become the rule rather than the exception in debt limit debates.
“There really is no other issue on which the hypocrisy is so bipartisan and so consistent year after year after year,” said Bruce Bartlett, who was a top Treasury Department official during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. “Half of these guys who are opposed to increasing the debt limit have voted multiple times to increase it in the past. The only difference is one of their guys was president.”
Who’s president makes all the difference in debt-ceiling votes because, ultimately, “presidents always want to raise the debt limit and treasury secretaries always want to raise the debt limit,” said Donald Marron, the director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, two center-left research centers.
When the same party controls the White House and the Senate, expect that party’s Senate members to support the president, who will get little or no backing from the minority camp. That’s what happened in stand-alone Senate debt-ceiling votes in 2003, 2004 and 2006, when Republican senators provided nearly all the votes to raise the debt ceiling for Bush.
“If you’re a Democrat, there just wasn’t a lot of reason to take the political pain of voting for a debt limit increase, whereas the Republicans had to round up enough votes to do it,” Marron said.
Democratic senators then passed Obama’s stand-alone debt limit increases with almost no Republican support in 2009 and 2010.
“What you see for these votes is a great deal of political jockeying to see who gets to vote no, which is really a much more political thing than a substantive thing,” Marron said.