The Debt Ceiling Is Dangerous. Here’s Why It Probably Isn’t Going Anywhere.

All-out partisan conflict has jammed the gears in the U.S. Senate in recent years, causing a virtual standstill. We’ve seen the Republican Party block a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court without a hearing or vote. We’ve seen both parties increasingly use the filibuster when they’re in the minority to impede the opposition from passing legislation. And we’ve seen a ratcheting up of brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, which establishes how much money the federal government can borrow to pay its existing financial obligations.

The use of the debt ceiling as a legislative hostage started in earnest in 2011, when a divided government in Washington nearly caused a debt default. Energized by the tea party movement, Republicans refused to back an increase in the debt ceiling unless then-President Barack Obama agreed to budget cuts, and they also refused to raise taxes as part of a bipartisan bargain. A last-minute agreement followed, but the delay still led to a downgrade in the country’s credit rating. Yet we’ve seen continued clashes over the cap ever since.

Those conflicts have escalated further in the current round. Although Democrats and Republicans have just about reached a deal to go ahead with a simple majority vote on a short-term debt ceiling increase, Republicans remain intent on filibustering a straight up-or-down vote on a longer-term suspension or increase of the limit in December. Democrats control the Senate, which is split 50-50, through Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote. But that’s well short of the 60 votes required by the filibuster to advance to a final vote.

“What I see as new here is filibustering debt limit increases and forcing a Senate majority party that doesn’t have 60 seats to try to come up with some way to raise the debt ceiling — even though it doesn’t have 60 seats and can’t get any help from the minority party,” said Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton University who studies congressional politics.

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Failing to raise the debt limit would result in a default on U.S. debt, which could cripple the economy and cause terrible repercussions for everyday Americans. The date the country runs out of money is quickly approaching: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently said it could be as soon as Oct. 18. While the parties seem set on a short-term agreement to push that deadline back to at least December, Republicans continue to say that, for a longer-term increase, Democrats must raise the cap on their own using the more complex reconciliation process, which allows passage of certain fiscal legislation with only a simple majority. And, while there are paths out of this predicament, this amplified disagreement is emblematic of the dangers the debt ceiling presents to our political system, especially when partisan enmity is so high. 

Here, then, is a look at how we got here; what could prevent politicians from using the debt ceiling to put Congress in a political stranglehold; and why it’s unlikely that the debt ceiling will go away anytime soon.

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How the battle over the debt ceiling escalated

Congress has always placed limits on federal debt, but it first established the debt ceiling in 1917 over concerns about debt piling up during World War I. About two decades later, in 1939, the cap came into its modern form after modifications applied it to nearly all federal debt. The idea was that aggregating most debt would give the Treasury Department more flexibility to manage it while maintaining Congress’s constitutionally mandated control of the nation’s finances. Over time, the state of the debt ceiling has also come to symbolize the federal government’s frugality or wastefulness.

Yet the limit’s means as a check on spending is questionable considering that the national debt has only gone up since the late 1930s. More importantly, as a share of the nation’s gross domestic product, debt has surged since the 1980s, following a long-running decrease after World War II, as the chart below shows. In other words, the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio — a measure of our debt that factors in our ability to pay it off by looking at it relative to the size of the nation’s economy — has grown immensely.

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