One wonders what the Biden administration is afraid of when it comes to calling the Republicans’s bluff on raising the federal debt ceiling. While White House officials no doubt have genuine legal and policy concerns about their ability to act unilaterally to defuse the crisis, the overriding reason is probably fear of the political consequences, and on that front they are both misreading the moment and misunderstanding the composition of the country’s electorate.
To quickly recap, Congress passes laws to “promote the general welfare” of the public, and those laws usually cost money. Not infrequently, the cost of those laws exceeds the amount of money the government has in the bank, so they have to borrow money to pay the bills. But because of an obscure 1917 law, the amount of loans the government can take out to pay its bills is capped at a set (and, frankly, relatively arbitrary) amount. When this happens, Congress must raise the limit of how much money can be borrowed to meet the country’s obligations.
