By Rick Manning
Remember when Democrats would quake in their boots when the nation hit the debt ceiling, because it was the ultimate symbol of out of control government spending?
Well those days have long passed.
Now, Democrats relish the opportunity to threaten Republicans that the nation will default on the national debt if Republicans don’t just blindly increase the limit.
It doesn’t matter that another trillion dollars has been borrowed to cover the cost of the country’s wants. It doesn’t even matter that the Senate Democrats have refused to pass legislation that would require the President to pay the nation’s creditors first if the debt ceiling was reached.
Nope, none of that matters, because the Senate Democrats are willing to not pay the country’s bills if they don’t get their way, and the House Republicans are not. Yet the media tells the uninformed public that the Republicans are the irresponsible ones.
Through the past three years of working with Speaker Boehner, Democrats know that he fears getting the political blame for taking a stand more than anything else, and they use this fear against him.
That is why the Democrats will bully Boehner into any deal they want on the debt ceiling, the only must-pass piece of legislation remaining in 2014.
Democrats know that if they succeed in getting the debt ceiling raised without making any real concessions on any issue, they will have won the legislative session.
After all, House Republicans will be able to do nothing about pending Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rules that are designed to eliminate tea party groups, while leaving Big Labor, trade associations and groups like the Rockefeller Foundation unscathed. This one rule, that effectively institutionalizes the IRS abuses of the Obama Administration, will be selectively used to emasculate Obama’s political enemies. This is Obama’s plan, and it is why Team Obama insists on a “clean” debt ceiling bill rather than stopping the rogue agency in its tracks.
With a clean debt ceiling bill, House Republicans will have zero capacity to rein in the out of control EPA for the rest of the year, as the funding for the Agency has already been authorized.
In fact, once the debt ceiling bill is passed, Congress might as well just go home, because the only actions they will take will be on Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s terms.
One would think that the Republicans’ new good friend, Senator Chuck Schumer, would throw Speaker Boehner a bone to allow him the dignity and pretense of importance, but instead, Schumer’s allies are pressuring the House to do the Senate’s bidding and cede its power over the purse by raising the ceiling, it last remaining leverage against Obama.
Anita S. Krisnakumar of the St. John’s University School of Law described the importance of the debt limit in 2005 as follows, “The statute is the last remnant of congressional control or accountability over the national debt — and the primary vehicle through which Congress fulfills its constitutional obligations under Article 1, Section 8 to oversee the borrowing and payment of the public debt. Second, the debt limit statute encourages legislators to consider the interests of the general public and future generations, rather than those of special interests, and thus acts as an important institutional check on party and interest group politics.”
Now is the time for the House to exert its authority and pass a debt ceiling increase that, at the bare minimum, ends Obama’s IRS regulations which have been opposed by the ACLU, SEIU and various right of center groups.
It is time for Speaker Boehner to step forward and end the weaponization of government that Obama is trying to expand.
It is time.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.
