“If everybody starts thinking we can get an extension, then the crisis won’t happen until the end of that extension,” one of those Republicans, Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), told Axios. “That’s just the way it works up here.”
They have a point. The history of these fights is unmistakable: They require imminent peril to get resolved.
In other words, we appear to be headed for the brink, one way or another.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen announced this week that the government could default on its debt obligations as soon as June 1 if Congress doesn’t increase the debt ceiling. (Republicans want a debt ceiling increase to be accompanied by spending cuts, while Democrats and the White House say the increase should be “clean” because it just amounts to paying your bills, and spending cuts can be addressed elsewhere through the budgeting process.)
At that point, we would enter truly uncharted territory, with untold consequences for the U.S. economy.
That territory is uncharted because we haven’t actually breached the deadline before. But we’ve come close. Repeatedly on the debt ceiling and matters like it, Congress has run right up to the deadline before one side caves, or the two sides come to an agreement. And that’s especially the case when we have a setup like we do now, with a Democratic president and Republicans wielding power in Congress.
- In 2011, the Treasury Department announced that “extraordinary measures” for averting a default would stop working Aug. 2. Congress cut a deal Aug. 1, with the House voting that night and the Senate following the next day to set up the “super committee” and the budget sequester.
- In 2012-2013, the “fiscal cliff” loomed at midnight Dec. 31. It was resolved shortly after the deadline, with the Senate voting around 2 a.m. Jan. 1 and the House voting that night.
- That deal still left the clock ticking on the debt ceiling. A mid-March 2013 deadline became an Oct. 17 deadline after a short-term deal, and Congress faced both a potential shutdown and a potential default around the same time. But even as a shutdown kicked in on Oct. 1, Congress failed to reach a deal until right before the Oct. 17 deadline. (Congress passed a debt ceiling suspension Oct. 16, and President Barack Obama signed it Oct. 17.)
- In December 2014, Congress passed a deal to avert another partial government shutdown with just hours to spare before the midnight Dec. 11 deadline.
- That deal also left another imminent deadline, with Republicans declining to extend funding for the Department of Homeland Security for more than a few months. Again, Congress cut a short-term deal to extend its deadline until March 6, 2015. A final deal was cut March 3.
While these two shutdown debates were resolved on the eve of the deadline, the government has breached those deadlines and gone into a partial shutdown, as it did in 2014. This also happened in early 2018 and in 2018-2019.
But while shutdowns are arduous and have real impacts, the debt ceiling presents a firmer deadline: a moment at which Pandora’s box is opened upon the American economy.
And indeed, that threat is the very reason these battles tend to get resolved so late. They are a game of chicken, in which you dare your opponent to take things too far, and both sides wait for the other to yield. The deadline is the leverage. Nobody has an incentive to cave earlier than that, in the hope that the other side will first.
To the extent it might get resolved earlier than the final hours or days, it will be because enough members of one party lose their stomach for this form of brinkmanship, or because party leaders decide the costs of what lies ahead might be too great for their side. (History suggests that it’s Republicans who most often get blamed for these things.) The debt ceiling also poses more immediate problems because we can see things such as credit downgrades merely for getting too close to the deadline — as happened in 2011.
But we also know that the newly empowered House Freedom Caucus is the biggest obstacle to a clean debt ceiling increase, and it has shown it’s more than willing to take things to the brink. Even if House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) might reason that it’s a bad idea to press forward at some point, he will know that caving too early is a recipe for a backlash from his right flank and could possibly even threaten his fledgling speakership. The tea party has forced the GOP into these fights before, but through a confluence of circumstances including a very tightly divided House, the Freedom Caucus has even more power to push the deadline.
All of which is to say: Whatever the deadline is, we’re likely headed for it. Even if Republicans could be prevailed upon to delay that deadline at some point, the new deadline will in all likelihood be threatened, as well.
