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Those who follow Capitol Hill closely inevitably confront an unfortunate truth: The legislative process can be incredibly frustrating. It’s slow and complicated. It’s meandering and counterintuitive. It’s filled with choke points, false starts, pitfalls, and hurdles. Sometimes, it seems miraculous when anything passes Congress at all.
But our Madisonian system of government has served as a pillar of the American experiment for more than two centuries, and it’s produced some landmark laws that helped make the United States the world’s preeminent global superpower.
It’s also a system congressional Republicans hope to undermine by way of their debt ceiling crisis.
We’ve all had a chance to review the GOP’s ransom note — the so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act — which identifies many of the party’s priorities. More specifically, as we’ve discussed in recent weeks, Republicans hope to gut all kinds of critically necessary public investments, affecting everything from veterans care to education, border security to food security, law enforcement to medical research, Head Start to rail inspections, agriculture to air traffic control, infrastructure to national parks. It also takes a crowbar to efforts to combat climate change for reasons that have nothing to do with deficit reduction.
Many in the party would argue, and have argued, that these are worthwhile goals, and that’s an argument well worth having. But among the underappreciated problems with the Republicans’ approach is the degree to which GOP lawmakers intend to effectively replace the nation’s existing legislative process with something ... different.
The party’s goals are obviously regressive and unpopular, but stepping back, a bigger picture emerges: If congressional Republicans want to pursue regressive and unpopular priorities, that’s certainly their right, but as elected federal lawmakers in the United States, they’re supposed to work within their own country’s legislative system.
In other words, GOP leaders and their members are supposed to write a bill, send it to committee, hold hearings, work through changes, hold debates, and try to pass it through one chamber. If successful, the process starts anew in the other chamber, at which point successful bills go to the White House for further consideration.
In the Republicans’ debt ceiling strategy, the party has an entirely different process in mind:
- Meet in secret and cobble together a wish list of far-right ideas.
- Pass it on the House floor without committee hearings, scrutiny, policy analysis, or consideration of any amendments.
- Tell the Senate and the White House that they, too, have to support it — whether voters like it or not — or GOP officials will impose an economic catastrophe on the public.
Why bother with the slow and exasperating Madisonian system of government when this radical alternative is so much more efficient? Why work through the country’s longstanding legislative process when extortion makes it more likely that Republicans can get what they want by threatening Americans with deliberate harm?
What’s more, once a new precedent is established, lawmakers of both parties will have learned a valuable lesson: Just wait until your party has some modicum of power, identify the next debt ceiling deadline, and throw your priorities into a ransom note.
The other party will balk, of course, but that’s hardly a hindrance. The old model — which is to say, the model that the United States has relied on for more than two centuries — will have effectively given way to a new model.
Daniel Pfeiffer, a veteran of the Obama White House, added in a New York Times op-ed this week, “This time it’s spending cuts and work requirements for Medicaid recipients. What happens when the debt limit comes up again next year? Will the Republicans demand a federal abortion ban? A pardon for the Jan. 6 perpetrators?”
Why wouldn’t they?
When thinking about the reasons President Joe Biden can’t negotiate with GOP leaders over the debt ceiling, let’s not forget about protecting the integrity of the American policymaking process.