[ad_1]
This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.
Mitch McConnell faced two futures. Both featured scorched earth.
One involved a global economic recession that would be triggered if he and his fellow Republicans refused to let the United States pay the government’s bills in the coming weeks. The other wasteland was a Senate without a filibuster where the party in power—notably, not his—could get its way with a simple majority vote.
Given his options, the Republican Leader of the Senate opted to preserve the obstructionist tactic of the filibuster and relented on the borrowing cap—at least for a few weeks. And when the new deadline gets here, he may yet make it painful for Democrats.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
The United States faced an Oct. 18 deadline to finish a one-page change to the borrowing limit, known around Washington and Wall Street as the debt ceiling. It’s a vestige of World War I and has routinely been changed by both parties as a routine matter for most of the last century. In fact, the ceiling has been raised 78 separate times since 1960.
But starting in 2006, what had been a routine vote for lawmakers started to carry weight. In that year, Democrats—including then-Sen. Joe Biden—used the debt-ceiling vote to lodge an election-year protest against George W. Bush’s tax cuts and heavy military spending. Democrats, it must be noted, did not filibuster and the hike of the artificial limit cleared with a 52-48 margin. They protested, but didn’t filibuster.
Now, 15 years on, the debt ceiling has trended into the partisan gutter like so much else in D.C. In 2011, the newly elected Republican majority in the House led a revolt that threatened a credit downgrade as both parties fought for the moral high ground on spending. Ultimately, a visibly peeved Obama signed a deal that reduced deficits by more than $2 trillion over the span of a decade without any…
[ad_2]
Source : time
