That is to say, in the fight over the continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government, an assemblage of fiscal “hawks” tanked a bill which had the blessing of President-elect Trump himself and which would have saved him the trouble of dealing with fights over debt ceiling extensions– fights which could easily give Democrats leverage over his administration should they retake the House in 2026. Worse still, 34 of these holdouts then voted against the eventual bare bones continuing resolution which passed the House, which even the Democrats weren’t obstructionist enough to do. Zero Democrats voted against the final bill. Yes, somehow the Republican caucus was more willing to vote down Trump’s preferred policy than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
We won’t mince words: this is asinine. And it doesn’t help that those Republicans seem to actively resent explaining their obstructionist behavior. As just one example, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) responded to criticism from our senior editor Jack Posobiec by announcing – in one of the most bizarre non sequiturs ever recorded– that she wouldn’t sleep with him. Thanks, Nancy, but we weren’t asking. No wonder members of South Carolina’s political class refuse to work with her because – in the words of South Carolina political consultant Wes Donehue – “I’m a political consultant and not a babysitter, a sex therapist or a doctor who can prescribe fixes for chemical imbalances.”
Fair enough, but apparently those chemical imbalances are now risking not just the GOP’s ability to govern, but specifically the future of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). After all, Johnson now faces the serious prospect of being tossed out of the job by his own caucus, much like his ill-starred predecessor Kevin McCarthy, because not only did he fail to get President-elect Trump’s preferred bill over the finish line; he backed the absolutely ridiculous 1500-page grab bag of pork and unearned goodies that was the initial attempt at a CR. It took President-elect Trump, as well as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to kill that particular exercise in Washingtonian business-as-usual.
Now, since we know the fiscal hawks delight in calling people RINOs simply because they don’t want to endorse austerity measures at the least convenient possible moment, let’s be clear about something: yes, obviously, government spending is a problem. But even they will, when pressed, admit that not all spending is created equal. As one example, many such hawks (including the likes of Mike Pence) are perfectly happy to spend money on arming Ukraine.
We don’t just bring this up to point out that many of these people are hypocrites (and, with the exception of Thomas Massie, they are), but to illustrate a point: the problem of Washington overspending is not soluble via indiscriminate cuts. Cutting the budget is politically risky, because practically everything Washington spends money on has its own miniature constituency. To make such cuts lasting reductions in the budget, therefore, they have to be popular, which means Republicans have to start by slashing items that advantage only the smallest, most niche concerns. In short, they have to start by targeting corruption – something which Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy put on a master class in doing when they attacked the bloated initial draft of the CR.
Now, knowing that, let’s ask a simple question: does maintaining the existence of debt ceiling fights help that goal? Well, to answer that, here’s a question: can any normal person remember the last time a debt ceiling fight led to lasting cuts? Because we can’t. Rather, what we remember is that the last time a debt ceiling fight happened – in 2023 – precisely one politically popular cut was included: the removal of $1.4 billion in funding for the IRS. Even though this was after the Biden administration had increased IRS funding by $80 billion. In other words, the Republican “victory” on that issue was a matter of reducing a spending increase by just under 2 percent. Yeah, the average American is really gonna be grateful the government was almost shut down and the US nearly defaulted on its debts over that. We’d compare these people to Ebenezer Scrooge, but at least Ebenezer Scrooge’s heartlessness was effective.
This is a consistent theme with fights over the debt ceiling: that is to say, they result in minimal, if not purely nominal victories. They are sound and fury, signifying nothing. If the debt ceiling were a merely academic subject, this would do no harm, but it isn’t. If the US ever hit the debt ceiling, it would plunge the world into an economic crisis. It would make US debt – one of the most widely trusted economic commodities – suddenly uncertain. It would humiliate our nation, crash our economy, and possibly irretrievably weaken our ability to recover from that crash. And no, contrary to what you’ve heard, raising the debt ceiling has nothing to do with new spending and everything to do with making sure we can pay for things we’ve already spent. Yes, excessive spending is still a disease (though we’re more restrained with it than about a dozen other nations, such as Japan and Italy), but using the debt limit to try to address it is like treating beheading as a cure for cancer.
We, at least, think that if our nation is going to risk being beheaded in order to fix its spending problem, then the people who use that tactic should have a lot to show for it. They do not. Rather, what they have are endless news cycles where Democrats look like they’re holding back America from the brink of financial ruin while Republicans dance with disaster because they think we spend too much money on orphanages. Thanks to DOGE, we have far better ways of tackling the problem – ways that do not require annual political eyesores for the GOP, but rather force those defending existing spending to justify it line by line in the face of a combined assault by Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and President-elect Trump himself. We simply don’t need the debt ceiling poison pill anymore.
Which is why, come March, we hope that President-elect Trump ceases to tolerate the economic sabotage of House GOP members whose fiscal politics are stuck in 2014. We hope that needlessly harsh, senselessly indiscriminate, and hypocritical fiscal “hawkery” goes the way of the Dodo bird, and if Mike Johnson has to be a casualty for that, then so be it. And as for the Nancy Maces of the world? Well, we’ve just got two words when it comes to her preferred style of politics: Would not.
