Shut down the shutdown
House Republicans have a choice: Honor the bipartisan deal they made earlier on the debt ceiling, or hurt Americans with their dysfunction.
When Fitch downgraded the U.S. bond rating earlier this year, House Republicans crowed about how their calls to get the nation’s fiscal house in order had been vindicated. They left out one important detail: the role of their own gun-to-America’shead brinkmanship with the nation’s finances.
That’s what Fitch was referring to when it cited, along with rising debt, “the erosion of governance … over the last two decades that has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions.” It’s the result of a cynical political strategy that a few candid Republicans have acknowledged — break government, then run on a platform of fixing broken government.
And here they go again, threatening the nation with a federal government shutdown if they don’t get their way on deep spending cuts and action on the southern border. Never mind that just three months ago, in strongly bipartisan votes, the House and Senate backed off another budgetary cliff with the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which suspended the debt ceiling to January 2025 and put in place broad spending limits. Now, for some on the right, that compromise means nothing. There’s a way out of this, but it would require something that those like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and GOP Conference Leader Elise Stefanik seem loath to do: Put country above politics and their own political futures.
Yes, America spends a lot of money — $6.27 trillion in the 2022-23 fiscal year. And it has a lot of debt — $26 trillion of which is publicly held — thanks to years of deficit budgeting under Democratic and Republican presidents and congresses alike. Debt payments consume around a half-trillion dollars a year. But just as growing the debt was a bipartisan undertaking, bringing it under control must be, too.
That’s not how a faction of Republican House members sees it, however. Joining them is the former president and GOP 2024 presidential frontrunner, Donald J. Trump — on whose watch the national debt grew by $6.7 trillion.
With a slim majority in the House, Mr. McCarthy can afford to lose only four votes on his side and still pass legislation without Democrats.
There is an alternative: Ignore the chaos caucus and forge a bipartisan deal with Democrats — just as the Senate did in a measure to keep the government open while talks continue on formal spending bills.
But “compromise” is a dirty word to Mr. Trump’s MAGA right, a movement fueled by conspiracy theories and oversimplified solutions to the nation’s problems, like building a fantastical border wall and recklessly gutting the government. It’s a movement in which wild proposals like GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s idea of firing 75 percent of the federal workforce — with huge consequences for vital programs and for unemployment — pass for sound policy ideas. What will it be, then, Mr. McCarthy? Bend to the hostage takers who are willing, even eager, it seems, to blow it all up? Or reach across the aisle, and yes, perhaps lose your prestigious title but avert a shutdown that will have repercussions for hundreds of thousands of federal workers and millions of Americans?
The choice is hard only if you don’t know what “doing the right thing for the country” means.