jasons cab: House GOP proves Standard & Poor?s right

Sunday, September 18, 2011

House GOP proves Standard & Poor?s right

Remember Mitch McConnell?s scheme to tie the Treasury?s borrowing authority to a resolution of disapproval that congressional Democrats would have to defeat or the White House would have to veto? It happened. And as far as I can tell, no one noticed.

The vote was on Wednesday night. The final tally saw 232 members formally disapproving of what was, in effect, a motion not to default on our debt and cause a global financial panic, and 186 members voting to keep current on our bills. The Treasury?s new borrowing authority amounts to only $500 billion, so the House and the Senate will have to hold a number of these votes between now and 2013. But no one seems to care. As Rosalind Helderman reported, the vote ?had no practical impact but allowed Republicans to once again express their displeasure at government borrowing.?

Interestingly, it didn?t even have much of a political impact: only four House Democrats voted to disapprove. That?s a far cry from the original theory behind the plan, which was that Democrats would be so terrified of being tied to the national debt that they would awkwardly vote to disapprove of the actions of a president in their own party.

Republicans, meanwhile, weren?t exactly a profile in courage. Fully 174 of them voted for the August deal that gave the White House between $2.1 trillion and $2.4 trillion in borrowing authority. But not one among that 174 voted to approve of the White House actually using that authority to avert default -- even in the presence of more than $900 billion in discretionary spending cuts, and a supercommittee charged with finding another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction.

So despite the deficit-reducing debt deal, 178 members of the House Republican Conference voted to disapprove of not defaulting on our debt. It?s a meaningless statement of fiscal irresponsibility rather than an actual moment of brinksmanship, but it sets a new precedent for how these votes will occur, and it makes it harder for any of those 178 members to ever vote to raise the debt ceiling again. If you?re Standard & Poor?s, you?re feeling pretty good about downgrading our credit rating right now.