Biden, House Democrats Exploring Risky Ways To Get Around Speaker McCarthy on the Debt Ceiling

With a deadline fast approaching for raising the debt ceiling in order to avoid a potential economic catastrophe, President Biden and House Democrats are looking to keep options on the table in case talks with Speaker McCarthy fall through.Messrs. Biden and McCarthy and congressional leaders are currently scheduled to sit down to discuss the debt ceiling on May 9, leaving only a few weeks for any negotiations on the topic ahead of the so-called X-date — the day the Department of the Treasury says America will officially default — which is expected to be June 1.Further complicating matters, there will only be six days (including May 9) when Mr. Biden is at Washington, D.C., while both the Senate and the House are in session between now and June 1.Senators on both sides of the aisle have made clear that they are planning to leave most of the negotiating to Messrs. Biden and McCarthy, though both the Senate minority and majority leaders will attend the May 9 meeting.As it stands, the White House and the House remain at an impasse, with Mr. McCarthy demanding sharp budget cuts, among other conservative policy items, and Mr. Biden demanding a debt ceiling increase with no strings attached.“He is not going to negotiate on the debt ceiling,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said. She added that Mr. Biden “is willing to have a separate conversation about their spending, what they want to do with the budget.”The budget deadline is also approaching. Although not as urgent, the House, Senate, and White House will need to resolve budgetary differences by September 30.While it’s not clear whether either side will budge at the meeting May 9, the White House and Democratic members in the House are keeping a few potential resolutions to the situation on the table, though they’re not without their issues.One potential resolution is through an experimental invocation of the 14th Amendment that would be a constitutional challenge to the idea of the debt limit itself.This theory hinges on language in the 14th Amendment that states that “validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”Some scholars argue that this clause gives the president the power to pay the national debt, regardless of what Congress does or does not do. Critics, though, argue that this reading of the amendment is in conflict with Article I of the Constitution.Article I reads: “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”With this legal theory still up for debate, this resolution would be far from a sure path through the debt ceiling issue and would almost certainly be the subject of litigation.Another less legally risky solution to the debt ceiling issue comes via the Democratic conference in the House, where some members have queued up a discharge petition, which could potentially circumnavigate the speaker’s power.A discharge petition is a legislative procedural maneuver that allows members of the House to discharge a bill from committee and bring it to the floor without the blessing of a committee or House leadership.To do so, legislators need to have an absolute majority of members sign the petition, meaning 218 of the House’s 435 members would need to sign on. This would require five Republicans to join the 213 House Democrats, an eventuality that is not out of the question but that there is little sign of at the moment.If the petition passes the House, it would then be able to pass via a process known as budget reconciliation in the Senate, which allows bills concerning spending, revenue, or the debt ceiling to pass by simple majority, avoiding the filibuster.The key risk associated with the discharge petition is that it relies on five Republicans joining Democrats to pass the measure. These petitions have been used in the recent past, though rarely on such a high-profile issue.In 2015, a group of lawmakers used a discharge petition to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank of the United States. In 2002, the maneuver was also used to pass the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, better known as McCain-Feingold.

Biden, House Democrats Exploring Risky Ways To Get Around Speaker McCarthy on the Debt Ceiling

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