McConnell: ‘We have no list of demands’ in raising debt ceiling

WASHINGTON — In March 2006, as the government veered dangerously close to a default, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the No. 2 Republican, let the Bush White House know he was two votes short of what he needed to raise the legal limit on federal borrowing.

Andrew Card, then the White House chief of staff, began working the phones. He soon found two Democrats willing to break ranks and vote to put the legislation over the top. But instead of thanking him, the Senate leader grew irate. McConnell had been hoping to extract concessions from President George W. Bush as the price for uniting Republicans around lifting the limit.

“I don’t need your damned votes,” he snapped at Card. He lifted the debt ceiling with Republicans only.

Card never learned what the Senate leader wanted, but he tells the story for a reason: McConnell has long used the periodic need to raise the government’s borrowing limit as a moment of leverage to secure a policy win, as have leaders of both parties.

But two weeks before a potentially catastrophic default, McConnell, now the minority leader, has yet to reveal what he wants, telling President Joe Biden in a letter Monday, “We have no list of demands.”

Instead, he appears to want to sow political chaos for Democrats while insulating himself and other Republicans from an issue that has the potential to divide them.

McConnell has said the government must not be allowed to stop paying its debts; he has also said he will not let any Republicans vote to raise the debt limit, while moving to block Democrats from doing so themselves.

He plans to do so again Wednesday, when the Senate will vote on whether to take up legislation to raise the debt ceiling until December 2022. If any Republican objects, it will take 60 votes to move forward, meaning that 10 GOP senators would have to join in doing so. No one expects those Republican votes to materialize.

McConnell has prescribed a single alternative for Democrats: Use a complicated budget process known as reconciliation to maneuver around the Republican filibuster that he refuses to lift.

“They need to do this, they have the time to do it, and the sooner they get about it, the better,” he said Tuesday.

He even seemed to taunt Democrats. A day after Biden told Republicans they “need to stop playing Russian roulette with the U.S. economy,” McConnell, in his signature deadpan, looked into television cameras on Capitol Hill to “implore” Democrats “not to play Russian roulette with the American economy.”

Hardball tactics by Republicans on the debt ceiling are not new. Showdowns in 1995 and 1996 shut down the government but also helped foster a balanced-budget agreement. A new Republican House majority in 2011 pushed the government so close to default that Standard & Poor’s downgraded once-unassailable U.S. debt, but it also produced the Budget Control Act, which crimped spending for years. The 2006 showdown has been used by both parties as an object lesson. McConnell has pointed to it to show that partisanship is nothing new; among the “no” votes on the debt ceiling increase that year were Sens. Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Democrats point to what they say is the more obvious lesson: They let the vote go through on a narrow majority, with no filibuster.

The same can be said for partisan debt ceiling increases passed in May 2003 and November 2004.

This year is different: Not only are Republicans refusing to vote for the measure, they’re creating an obstacle to stop Democrats from pushing it through themselves.

“There’s still time for 10 Republicans to join us, no matter what some of the extremists on the hard right think,” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, pleaded the day before the Wednesday vote to move to his debt ceiling bill.

Sen. Angus King of Maine, a moderate independent, sounded despondent. “There’s no bargaining. They’re just stamping their feet and saying no.”

With no overt policy demands to be met as the price for cooperation, Democrats say for Republicans, the chaos is the point

— or at least a vague hope that the latest legislative crisis will somehow undermine Democrats’ ability to fulfill unrelated parts of Biden’s agenda, especially an expansive bill to combat climate change and reweave the fraying social safety net.