President Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy reached a deal over the weekend to suspend the debt limit for two years.
It is about what you’d expect from an agreement between a Democratic president and congressional Republicans who narrowly control only one chamber of Congress — maybe better than what you’d expect given the potential fractiousness of the GOP majority.
It seemed possible that McCarthy wouldn’t be able to unite his caucus to pass anything and Republicans would get forced into eating a clean increase or, worse, the party would stumble into getting blamed for whatever chaos that would have come from passing the deadline for an extension.
Instead, partly as a function of the prolonged speakership fight that brought members of the House Freedom Caucus inside the leadership’s tent, McCarthy deftly got everyone on board a debt-ceiling measure with significant fiscal and other reforms.
As soon as it passed, the White House was on its wrong foot, and its insistence that the president wouldn’t negotiate was made unsustainable.
Rather than getting the clean deal that it deemed the only acceptable outcome, the White House has had to make some meaningful, if not decisive, concessions.
The deal could hold non-defense discretionary spending in 2024, exclusive of veterans’ programs, at roughly 2022 levels, and save about $1 trillion in spending over the next decade. It increases the age caps on work requirements for food stamps to include adults with no children in the home who are ages 50 to 54. It includes permitting reforms that should expedite approvals for some energy projects, and blesses the Mountain Valley Pipeline that will run from West Virginia to Virginia. And it has provisions to create incentives for Congress to actually pass appropriations bills rather than resorting to yet another blowout omnibus bill.
All that is to the good, but as a means of addressing the ongoing fiscal incontinence of the federal government, and other deficiencies in how Washington operates, the deal is obviously inadequate.
The provisions in the GOP bill to overturn Biden’s lawless student-debt “forgiveness,” to enshrine the REINS Act reform of the regulatory state, and to repeal the Biden energy tax credits were all worthy, but Republicans never had enough leverage to force these large-scale changes on the White House.
There may be less than meets the eye even in some of the limited victories in the deal. The White House is telling reporters of side deals with Republicans that will already take some of the bite out of the spending reductions. Republicans wanted to repeal all of the new $80 billion in IRS funding but instead got an agreement to cut $20 billion. That cut, though, may just make room for more spending elsewhere, while the IRS pulls forward some of the $80 billion planned for future years to fund its current priorities.
The same is true of the clawback of $30 billion in unspent Covid funds. That also could make headroom for more spending, and it’s always possible that the money that ends up getting rescinded was never going to be really spent anyway.
It’s understandable that House conservatives are loath to vote for the deal, and they shouldn’t have to — Democrats need to provide the votes to get this deal, cut by the leader of their party, over the top.
That said, even the conservative critics of the deal should realize that there are limits to what can be achieved with a Democratic White House. The outrage shouldn’t be that Republicans fail to get more of what they want from fiscal Hail Mary passes around debt-limit increases and end-of-year spending bills, but that they haven’t done more to put spending on a different trajectory when they have had unified control of Washington. Donald Trump has harangued House Republicans to force a default to get everything they want yet was happy to maintain elevated levels of deficit spending when he was president, even prior to Covid.
Republicans need to keep making the case for a longer-term agenda of fiscal sanity. That should include, among other things, reforming entitlements, vouchering and reducing K–12 educational funding, and reforming student loans, especially making fewer loans to graduate students.
None of this will happen, of course, unless Republicans nominate and elect a presidential candidate who knows and cares enough about these questions to make them a priority of his or her administration and actually follow through.
Otherwise, the conservative agenda in the House will remain, at best, an opening bid.