PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — If not for Congress voting overnight to send a $2.5 trillion increase in the nation's borrowing authority to President Joe Biden, the Treasury Department said the country would have defaulted on its debt today for the first time in history.
The final vote from the House happened just after midnight. It was a vote mainly along party lines in both chambers. Now this goes to Biden's desk for his signature.
The action came just hours shy of a deadline set by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who warned last month that she was running out of maneuvering room to avoid the nation's first-ever default.
"The full faith and credit of the United States should never be questioned," Speaker Nancy Pelosi said from the House floor shortly before the vote.
Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger was the only Republican from either chamber to vote for the bill. Last week, 14 Senate Republicans actually joined the Democrats in an agreement to fast track this legislation, bypassing the 60-vote threshold to avoid a GOP filibuster. Just a simple majority was needed.
Lee said the process was intended to make the Republican votes last week "appear as something other than helping Democrats raise the debt ceiling," which he said Republican leadership "committed, in writing no less, not to do."
CBS News political analyst Leonard Steinhorn says the GOP has been trying to tie this to the Democrats.
"Even though this vote doesn't authorize new spending, that's exactly how the Republicans have been framing it -- trying to turn it into a referendum on President Biden's proposed social spending and climate package, which the Senate is now considering," he said.
That hasn't stopped Republican saber-rattling. For months, they've used the debt limit to attack Democrats' big-spending social and environmental agenda while pledging to staunchly oppose the current effort to increase the threshold. As recently as October, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would not "be a party to any future effort to mitigate the consequences of Democratic mismanagement."
Yet McConnell softened his opposition, striking a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last week that created a workaround that allowed Senate Democrats to approve legislation with a simple majority while avoiding a Republican filibuster.
"This is about paying debt accumulated by both parties," Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday while hailing the agreement.
McConnell's backtracking angered some in his party. But it also gave him much of what he wanted: Democrats taking a politically difficult vote without Republican support, while increasing the limit by a staggering dollar figure that is sure to appear in future attack ads.
"If they jam through another taxing and spending spree this massive debt increase will just be the beginning," the Kentucky Republican said Tuesday.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, however, framed it as a vote to approve the debt accumulated by both parties. And in fact, the $2.5 trillion debt limit increase does cover the cost of spending decisions made by Congress under both Republican and Democratic majorities.
Steinhorn says raising the debt ceiling shouldn't really be a political argument.
"Typically Democrats and Republicans vote together to raise or suspend the debt ceiling," he said, "but as with just about everything in politics these days, even a bill to avoid a catastrophic default on spending accumulated by all previous presidents, both Republicans and Democrats, has turned into a partisan issue."
The nation's current debt load of $28.9 trillion has been racking up for decades. Major drivers include popular spending programs, like Social Security and Medicare, interest on the debt and recent COVID-19 relief packages. But taxation is also a major factor, and a series of tax cuts enacted by Republican presidents in recent decades has added to it, too.
That includes $7.8 trillion heaped onto the pile during Donald Trump's four-year presidency, an analysis of Treasury records shows. The GOP-championed 2017 tax cut is projected to add between $1 trillion and $2 trillion to the debt, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
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