I rarely publish posts without commentary of my own, but David Dayen—the executive editor at The American Prospect, where he has injected new life during his tenure—has written a piece that needs no additions from me. He writes, Reconciliation Is Available to End Debt Limit Hostage-Taking:
While Democrats have already signaled the end-of-the-year session will be busy, one priority shines above everything else: the need to prevent a debt limit hostage situation before it develops by extinguishing this unnecessary anachronism entirely. And Democrats can do this, in contrast to many of their other priorities, by using the last unused tool for a majority vote in the Senate: the fiscal year 2023 reconciliation bill.
David Dayen
That reconciliation process (which can’t be filibustered) will take just a few weeks in the lame duck, and include either raising the debt limit to some astronomically high amount, or eliminating it entirely. It must be done before Republicans take the House and fulfill their stated plan to use the debt limit as a mechanism to force deep spending cuts they couldn’t get otherwise. [...]
Every budget includes the opportunity for reconciliation. The two most consequential bills in the first Biden term—the American Rescue Plan in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022—were a product of reconciliation. But today we are in fiscal year 2023, which started on October 1. Congress has the ability to use the 2023 reconciliation bill right now. And reconciliation can be a vehicle to increase the debt limit; it was done four times in the 1980s and ’90s. [...]
Failing to do so would be irresponsible. Republicans are vowing to force cuts to earned benefit programs that are a bedrock of the Democratic Party. The party campaigned on rejecting any such cuts, and the president has given an ultimatum. This would push them into an impossible choice: go back on their word, or risk a default of U.S. debt. Neither is advisable or necessary. There’s a third option that is available, has been used before, and would permanently end the toxic politics that corrodes faith in government. That can be avoided. It’s up to the leadership, and they need to figure it out quickly.
(if you’re interested in some background on TAP, the Columbia Journalism Review recently published ‘The Left Edge of the Possible’—How The American Prospect became the magazine of the moment.)