Trump’s Debt Ceiling Power Play Is a Prelude to the Congressional Chaos to Come
With hours left before the U.S. government was slated to run out of money last week, Elon Musk and Donald Trump took to social media to strong-arm the House GOP into abandoning a bipartisan deal to keep the government open.
Musk — who has taken to behaving like an unelected potentate — aimed a barrage of postings at GOP Congress members who were thinking of voting for the short-term spending bill. The social media posts came as Musk was also endorsing Germany’s Neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the country’s upcoming elections. Then, hours later, Trump — who on such matters of state spending has all-too-visibly taken a backseat to his centi-billionaire benefactor — weighed in with a series of impossible demands built around the GOP entirely scrapping the debt ceiling to give his incoming administration carte blanche for no-limits spending.
A day after the Musk-Trump ultimatum was issued, an opportunistic alliance of Democrats and ultraconservative Republicans rejected the legislation Trump’s team had demanded. And shortly after that, Congress passed — and President Biden signed — a much slimmed down version of the original legislation to keep government funded until the spring. The bill did not contain a provision to abolish the debt ceiling and makes it all-but-certain that conservatives will be able to push another messy political fight over spending just months into the new Trump presidency.
The Musk-Trump attempt, days before Christmas, to scupper legislation needed to keep government functioning and government funds flowing, turned out to be a ham-fisted effort at arm-twisting that ended up alienating core parts of the Trump congressional coalition.
Trump emerged from the fight bruised and, arguably, weakened. But so did House Speaker Mike Johnson. Never a natural fit for the speakership, he has ended up alienating the incoming president — and his Musk-ovite henchman — mere weeks before he faces his own re-election moment in the House.
In the abstract, getting rid of the debt ceiling isn’t a bad idea. Progressive Democrats have routinely expressed their fury at the leverage it gives to the most anti-government wing of the GOP. Those members have, in recent years, attempted to use the issue as a way to blackmail their colleagues into accepting their agenda of slashing spending while cutting taxes for the wealthy in exchange for not letting the U.S. government default on its debt obligations. And at times over the past four years, the risk of default has grown so large that some constitutional law scholars have even urged President Biden to invoke the 14th Amendment — part of which states that the government will not default on its debts — to bypass an intransigent Congress.
But Musk and Trump haven’t had a come-to-Jesus conversion moment around the importance of adequate government spending on services vital to the well-being of the country. In fact, Musk’s inchoate Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has only just begun to use the threat of massive government cuts in order to tame the federal civil service and bend it entirely to the will of Musk-Trump. This is about the balance of power: In the same way that Trump floated the idea of recessing Congress to bypass the Senate’s powers to confirm (or block) his cabinet nominees, so, having slogged through government shutdowns during his first term in office, he now wants to unilaterally concentrate the power to shape a financial agenda in the executive branch of government, largely removing the House of Representatives’ control over the purse strings.
Trump sought to intimidate GOP congress members, by making it clear that he would encourage primary challenges against any member who supported the legislation, which included several Democratic priorities, to temporarily secure additional funds for the government. And, as gleefully noted by right-wing media outlets, he issued a double-edged note of optimism to Johnson, saying that he thought the speaker, who is up for re-election, would do just fine … so long as he had the wisdom to pull the bipartisan deal.
Johnson is all too aware that he only acquired his current job after his own caucus members defenestrated former Speaker Kevin McCarthy for daring to negotiate with the Democrats to keep government open a few debt ceiling spending fights back, and that he only got there after pretty much every other plausible candidate dropped out of contention. So, duly chastened, the current speaker immediately pulled the bill and set his caucus to work on penning new legislation that would fund the government enough to keep it up and running through the presidential transition period.
In Trump’s imagination, Congress ought to be there to pass politically popular tax cuts. Despite his big talk on lowering government spending, he seems less keen on cutting spending on programs that his constituents use so as to fund these tax cuts. Instead, he wants the freedom to borrow more and more and more money as a hedge against the austerity politics demanded by so many on the right of his own party. In his first term, Trump explosively added to the national debt to the tune of roughly eight trillion dollars. His current set of proposals seem likely to prove an encore to this unseemly economic performance.
Unfortunately for Trump, that economic worldview is anathema to many Freedom Caucus-styled Congress members, who have long sought to tie debt ceiling increases to cuts in overall government spending; and over the course of a frenetic 24 hours, dozens of ultraconservatives in Congress balked at passing legislation that would essentially strip Congress of one of its prime levers of control over the nation’s purse strings, and make it far easier for a strong president to basically push his personal wish-lists of tax cuts combined with spending on pet projects such as the border wall, with no concern for the long-term fiscal implications.
There are few things on this earth that would convince dozens of this current crop of GOP congress members, beholden as they are to the MAGA base, to vote against the explicit orders of Donald J. Trump. But one of those things, it appears, is the nation’s debt ceiling.
In presiding over passage of a government spending bill that didn’t meet Trump’s needs on the debt ceiling, Speaker Johnson’s challenges have suddenly become a whole lot bigger . At the best of times, Johnson’s hold over the GOP caucus, and its vanishingly slim majority in the House, has been tenuous. He managed to pass legislation continuing to fund Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russia’s invasion only with the backing of Democrats. A week after winning the presidential election, Trump endorsed Johnson’s re-election efforts; now, however, the speaker has been unable to deliver the House on a key Trump demand. In consequence, it is more likely that, early in the new year, Johnson’s fractious House members will fail to unite in the way that is needed to deliver the votes that would keep him in control of the speaker’s gavel. It all speaks volumes to the chaos likely to engulf the Capitol over the coming years as Trump, governing by social media pronouncement, seeks to accumulate presidential powers at the expense of the other branches of government.