President Barack Obama has whined that until this point in our history, debt ceiling increases in the United States have been a matter of routine. But why should they be? Isn't that part of the problem?
"In the past, raising the debt ceiling was routine," Obama said in his address to the nation on July 25, arguing in favor of a congressional agreement on raising the debt limit. "Since the 1950s, Congress has always passed it, and every president has signed it."
Yesterday, while the House and Senate frantically tried to come up with a solution to avoid default — a Republican bill revised by Speaker John Boehner to satisfy hard-liners last night passed the House, but faces death in the Senate — the president reiterated that it's "a vote that Democrats and Republicans have been taking for decades."
We suppose it's an interesting bit of trivia that Ronald Reagan agreed to raise the nation's borrowing limit 18 times during his two terms, while President George W. Bush agreed to it seven times.
And the president is correct to point out that, contrary to the claims of the most conservative members of Congress, lifting the debt ceiling doesn't give Congress or the White House a blank check. It simply authorizes the Treasury to pay bills for expenses that Congress has already approved.
But when Congress knows that it has what is essentially the world's biggest line of credit available with the "routine" stroke of a pen, well, then why would they hesitate to use it?
There ought to be some understanding that, when the nation's debt reaches a high of $14.3 trillion, the old "routine" is no longer acceptable —that trillion-dollar increases in the nation's borrowing limit ought not be a ho-hum affair. And if nothing else, this debate has called attention to the Beltway logic that has made them seem that way.
The Boehner bill is not perfect, but it does offer a path out of this fiscal no-man's-land. Naturally, the full Massachusetts House delegation voted against it.
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