As Donald Trump and House GOP leaders discuss raising the debt ceiling in a bill separate from reconciliation, some Republican hard-liners maintain that including the debt limit in the partisan reconciliation process is the way to go.
“We should put it on one of the reconciliation bills so that we don’t have to pass it with Chuck Schumer,” House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris told NOTUS on Tuesday.
While that might seem like an obvious answer, voting for a debt ceiling hike might present a challenge to GOP leaders. There are some Republicans — like Rep. Tim Burchett — who have never voted for a debt limit increase and seem hesitant to start now.
Even as fellow Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman seconded Harris’ stance, telling NOTUS that the debt ceiling increase “needs to be in” reconciliation, he wouldn’t commit to supporting a debt limit hike.
“It depends on the cuts and where we are with it,” Norman said. “I don’t want a sovereign debt crisis.”
Republican leaders have already begun to accept that including the debt limit in reconciliation simply complicates an already complicated bill. Republicans can hardly spare a single vote in the House on their reconciliation package, and adding the debt limit could sink the package right from the start.
Speaker Mike Johnson also complicated the debt limit even further when he promised to pair the hike with $2.5 trillion in spending cuts. Congress has traditionally relied upon a bipartisan majority to raise the debt ceiling, with Democrats supplying most of the votes.
But steep cuts like that almost certainly wouldn’t fly with the Democratic Caucus, meaning if the debt limit isn’t included in reconciliation, it probably can’t include those reductions. Johnson can try to add the cuts in the reconciliation bill without the debt ceiling — counting on Republicans for one part of the deal and Democrats for the other part — but the whole scheme is messy. Johnson would, in effect, be counting on lawmakers from both parties to ignore what the other party is doing. The gambit seems unlikely.
Enter Trump’s idea: Pair the debt limit with California disaster aid. While the suggestion is already angering Democrats, it may be a way for Johnson — for the time being — to ignore his promise to make $2.5 trillion in cuts.
But again, hard-line Republicans are a problem.
Rep. Chip Roy called the California aid-debt limit proposal “bullshit” and said the “swamp’s going to swamp.”
“The effort by normal swamp creatures to put the debt ceiling along with either appropriations or the California supplemental, which is coming like a freight train, is done precisely to achieve their desired result, which is to spend a crap ton of money. It is purposeful,” Roy told NOTUS. “So, yeah, I oppose that.”
Of course, nothing is decided at this point.
Johnson told reporters on Tuesday that he is “not really wed” to raising the debt ceiling in reconciliation and that it was merely “the initial idea.”
“It’s part of the process. We got to get everyone to ‘yes,’” Johnson told NOTUS in a brief interview on Tuesday. “It’s a slow process, slower for some than others, but it’s part of my reality.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said that “no final decisions” have been made, acknowledging that “anything involving reconciliation is going to be very delicate.”
Most members can at least agree on that point: The debt ceiling would make reconciliation tricky.
“I don’t see how they can get it across the line,” one senior GOP member told NOTUS, adding that there are conversations about potentially attaching a debt ceiling increase to government funding or disaster relief, but ultimately, nobody really knows what leadership will do.
But already, the unwillingness of some GOP hard-liners to support reconciliation if there is a debt ceiling increase in the package is aggravating senior Republicans.
“The problem is that the reason why you would even consider that is because we can’t get confirmation that every Republican will vote for a debt ceiling increase,” Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith said of removing a debt ceiling increase from reconciliation. “We lose one person, we can’t pass it. So that means you have to negotiate with Democrats.”
Smith also told NOTUS that many of the Republicans “who are vocally saying they’re opposed right now would never vote for a debt ceiling to begin with.”
Rep. Frank Lucas, another senior Republican, shared Smith’s frustration.
“The debt ceiling has to be addressed because that’s covering the hot checks that have already been spent, not new spending,” he said. “Reconciliation is probably going to be a very party-line vote. That makes it difficult for some of my friends who have never stepped up to that responsibility. If it winds up in something like the appropriations process or an emergency supplemental bill, there’s probably a broader appeal to the membership as a whole.”
“So it’s strategy,” Lucas told NOTUS. “It’s playing chess, not checkers.”
Either way, Republicans will have to make a decision soon. According to a timeline Republicans discussed this week, the plan is to adopt a budget by the end of February that will serve as the blueprint for reconciliation. That means Republicans either lock in those $2.5 trillion in cuts for their budget or lock in that it won’t be included in the reconciliation bill.
Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington told reporters Tuesday afternoon that he would “prefer putting a debt limit alongside fiscal reform,” suggesting he may actually want the debt limit included in the reconciliation bill.
Arrington added that there were “two primary fiscal policies” in the reconciliation legislation: “pro-growth policies” and “mandatory spending reduction.”
“The whole purpose and nature of a debt ceiling is to let everybody know in the country that we’re on fragile fiscal footing,” he said.
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Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.
Emily Kennard, who is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.