Congress Found Vrtue in Compromise — At Last

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Jun 5, 2023

After months of drama, it appears that not much of substance has changed. There’s no default, no cuts in Social Security or Medicare, two of the government’s most popular programs, and no huge cuts in Medicaid, a health care program for low-income folks.

Nor was it necessary to make any move as radical as invoking the 14th Amendment to challenge the constitutionality of the debt ceiling, which might have been overturned by the Supreme Court anyway.

And there was no dethroning of McCarthy, who, as part of his deal with his party colleagues to win his leadership post, could be vulnerable to any one of his House GOP colleagues, particularly more extreme die-hard conservatives.

Of course, taking the longer view, it is easy to see that the debt ceiling bill should never have been necessary. Congress should be able to, as a routine matter, authorize the borrowing of money it had already told the Treasury to spend.

The U.S. and global economies should have been spared the anxieties inflamed by tension over a possibly disastrous default that resulted from the legislation’s delay.

It also is wrong as a matter of principle for the House Republican majority to use must-pass legislation such as the debt limit law as leverage to extract spending reductions from the White House. In practice, that strategy has produced a modest increase in fiscal responsibility.

Yet, in view of the long-running dysfunction brought on by the hyperpartisan political environment, the passage of the debt ceiling measure represents a major achievement. It shouldn’t be so hard for such valuable agreements to be reached.

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)