[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 21 (Wednesday, February 1, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S189-S192]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              DEBT CEILING

  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, let me begin with a simple statement 
which I hope every Senator in this body agrees with: that the United 
States of America pays its bills on time.
  We have since our Nation was founded. We never default on our debts. 
We always pay what we owe. We honor our financial obligations to all 
Americans and all those who invest in the American economy. And because 
we pay our bills on time, the United States has earned a reputation as 
a reliable, credible, and trustworthy partner around

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the world, and that helps every single American and our entire economy.
  Now, as everybody in this Chamber knows, in order to maintain the 
full faith and credit of the United States, we have to raise the debt 
ceiling. And this is not about new spending. This is about paying the 
bills that are already due and already owing under the laws that we 
have already passed in this country and that have already been signed 
by Presidents of both parties.
  When Donald Trump was President of the United States, Republicans 
voted with Democrats to raise the debt limit three times, and the U.S. 
Congress has raised the debt limit a total of 78 times since 1960, 
under both Democratic and Republican Presidents.
  If the Government of the United States had failed to raise the debt 
ceiling in the past, we would have faced an economic catastrophe. Think 
about it this way: You wouldn't just wake up one day and decide not to 
make your mortgage payment or not to make your car payment. You pay 
what you owe. It is as simple as that.
  And you know that, if you were to wake up one morning and say that 
you are not paying your mortgage or you are not paying your car 
payment, you will face consequences. If you don't pay your mortgage, 
you could have your home foreclosed on. If you don't pay your car 
payments, your car can be repossessed.
  The same logic applies to the U.S. Government, but the consequences 
are not confined to just one individual or one homeowner or one car 
owner. If the United States fails to pay its bills on time, every 
American--everyone inside this room and everyone outside this room--
will suffer the consequences. We are not talking about risking 
foreclosure on one house or losing one car. We are talking about the 
economy of our country grinding to a halt. If the United States stops 
paying our bills, our economy takes a nose dive. It is as simple as 
that.
  When I talk to my colleagues here on the Senate floor, both 
Republicans and Democrats, they agree that it is a no-brainer. You pay 
what you owe. You raise the debt ceiling. You don't default. It is 
common sense.
  In fact, I was listening just the other day to Republican leader 
Senator McConnell, who said:

       America must never default on its debt.

  He said that a few days ago. I agree.
  But across and on the other side of the Capitol, in the House of 
Representatives, Speaker McCarthy and the new majority, composed of 
some very rightwing and extreme Members, are taking their orders from 
former President Donald Trump, the same Donald Trump who as President 
signed three debt limit increases into law. Now he wants Republicans to 
use the debt limit as a club against President Biden.
  House Republicans are stalling our efforts right now to pay our bills 
on time, even though they know--just as Senator McConnell knows, just 
as every Senator here knows--that failing to do so would result in 
chaos and calamity for the country. It is a threat designed to force 
the rest of the U.S. Congress into enacting an extreme rightwing 
agenda.
  So let's be very clear. Here is what House Republicans are saying. 
They are saying: You do what we want or else we will tank the American 
economy.
  I think anybody hearing that proposition would recognize it for what 
it is--a form of economic terrorism. But MAGA Republicans are holding 
the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to impose their 
agenda on the American people. They have decided to politicize what 
should be a nonpartisan issue because Democrats and Republicans in the 
House and the Senate have voted for programs to require us to raise the 
debt ceiling in the past.
  In fact, I think it would be important to know that we would not be 
here at this time, on the Senate floor, having hit the debt ceiling and 
trying to work to make sure we avoid actually going over the cliff--we 
would not be here--if it was not for the tax cuts that were passed 
during the Trump administration. We would not be here at this 
particular moment. And, in fact, 25 percent of the total national debt 
was accumulated during the Trump administration--25 percent of the 
total debt of the United States, during the Trump administration.
  Now, I want to be clear, I am not saying this is all Republican debt, 
but it certainly is not all Democratic debt. This is the debt of the 
country. This is the debt owed by Uncle Sam.
  And what does the Constitution of the United States tell us about how 
we treat America's debt?
  Well, here is the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution right 
here, and what it says is this:

       The validity of the public debt of the United States, 
     authorized by law, including debts incurred for the payment 
     of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing 
     insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

  The Fourteenth Amendment passed shortly after the Civil War, and it 
is crystal clear that the obligation to pay America's debts is not a 
Democratic obligation; it is not a Republican obligation. It is an 
American obligation, and beyond being the right thing to do, it is in 
the Constitution of the United States. It is a national duty and a 
constitutional duty.

  So, as I listen to Speaker McCarthy and his Republican House 
colleagues, they want us to ignore the Fourteenth Amendment. They want 
to impose their reckless policies on the rest of us under threat of our 
doing what they want us to do. So I do want to be clear about what the 
consequences of this would be.
  I talked in general terms about economic catastrophe. Here is what it 
would mean. It would mean seniors going without Social Security 
benefits. It can mean troops going for weeks or even months without 
pay--the men and women in uniform who are out there protecting our 
country. Medicare may not be able to cover the costs of a doctor's 
visit. Those are just some of the governmental functions that could 
come to a grinding halt if we don't pay our debts on time, and we don't 
know the full extent of what would happen because, as I said, we have 
never been there before. This is uncharted territory.
  Economists estimate a very dire toll: 3 million jobs lost; $130,000 
added to the cost of your average 30-year mortgage. I want everyone to 
hear that. The mortgage costs for homeowners would go up. And, of 
course, as the mortgage costs for homeowners go up, the value of 
everyone who has already got a House also goes down. Retirement 
accounts in free fall, skyrocketing borrowing costs on car loans, and 
we would be hit by this catastrophe just as we are recovering from the 
economic hit we took during the pandemic. And it would trigger an 
increase in costs just as we are beginning to turn the corner on 
inflation.
  So why would anyone do this? Why would someone threaten to do this?
  I have been listening very carefully to Speaker McCarthy and 
Republicans in the House, and they say that they want to reduce the 
deficit and the national debt. That is what they say, but this is one 
of those situations where you always say: Watch what they do, not what 
they say.
  The reality is that Republicans, through their actions and their 
records, don't care about the deficit and the debt. That is not their 
priority because, if they really cared about the deficit and the debt, 
they would not have passed the 2017 Trump tax cuts without a plan to 
pay for them--a tax cut, by the way, which disproportionately benefited 
the very, very rich and big multinational corporations--because that 
tax cut, that giveaway to the very wealthy and big corporations, it 
increased the deficit by $2 trillion over 10 years, added to our 
national debt.
  As I said, we wouldn't even be here today, at this point in time, but 
for the fact that Republicans increased the deficit by $2 trillion. By 
the way, that is not my estimate, that $2 trillion. That is from the 
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
  And if Republicans really cared about reducing the deficit and debt, 
they could have joined us, just last year, when we closed a number of 
loopholes for big corporations, a measure that reduces the deficit by 
$238 billion over the next 10 years. That is something Democrats did. 
We didn't have a single Republican vote here in the Senate or in the 
House for that.
  And if Republicans really cared about reducing the deficit and debt, 
the Republican-controlled House of Representatives would not, as one of 
their very first measures, have passed a law

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to slash the funding that the IRS desperately needs to enforce the law 
against wealthy tax cheats.
  Let me say that again. They cut the moneys that the IRS needs to 
enforce current tax law against very wealthy Americans and big 
corporations that are not paying what they owe today. They are getting 
away with cheating on their taxes, and Republicans cut the money that 
the IRS needs to go after them. And this is very explicitly, as the 
Secretary of Treasury said, talking about Americans who earn more than 
$400,000 every year, including lots of multimillionaires and 
billionaires in the country.
  So when you say the IRS can no longer have the funds to go after 
wealthy tax cheats, what happens? You collect less revenue from very 
wealthy people. And what happens when you collect less revenue from 
very wealthy people? You increase the deficit. In fact, the nonpartisan 
Congressional Budget Office says that the action the House already took 
would increase the deficit by over $114 billion. This is from the 
Republicans in the House who are now threatening the United States not 
pay its bills, claiming that they care about the deficit and debt, when 
one of the very first actions that they took was to increase it. So 
that is just not the case. Their actions indicate that they don't care 
about the deficit.
  What is it really about? So what Republicans are really after is 
attacking critical investments that support the American people and 
that help strengthen our country. As one Republican strategist, Grover 
Norquist, once said, it is about shrinking the government down to the 
size where you can ``drown it in the bathtub.''
  This House Republican majority is desperate to cut and decimate 
programs that Americans need and that our future requires. So, for 
example, they want to cut some of the new initiatives we undertook to 
supercharge American innovation. We passed legislation, the CHIPS and 
Science Act, designed to maintain our technological edge over China and 
others. They want to cut it. They want to roll back investments that we 
made that are already bringing more high-tech manufacturing jobs back 
to the United States. We want to ensure those manufacturing jobs. They 
want to continue to offshore those good jobs. They want to cut 
investments we are making in clean energy that will help us fight the 
climate crisis, strengthen the American workforce, and, yes, also help 
us better compete around the globe, where China has a huge headstart 
when it comes to things like electric batteries. They want to cut Pell 
grants, which help millions of Americans pursue a college degree. They 
want to cut investments we are finally making to modernize our national 
infrastructure--something that was very bipartisan here in the U.S. 
Senate. That is important for our roads, our bridges, our transit 
systems, our ports, our airports. They want to cut it. Some are talking 
about cutting Medicare and Social Security.

  That is just a partial list of what the House Republicans are 
threatening to do, and they are saying that if we don't all agree to 
that, they are not going to allow the United States to pay its bills on 
time.
  The bottom line here is, when you look at the Republican playbook, it 
is cutting investments that are important to the American people and 
important to the success of our country while pushing for more tax cuts 
for the superwealthy. This is not a new movie; this is a rerun; this is 
trickle-down economics. It is the same old playbook, and here they go 
again.
  But here is the thing: We have been here before. Some of us were here 
when this threat was last made. I vividly remember the year 2011. It 
was another moment when the Republicans were fresh--fresh--after 
winning a majority in the House of Representatives. I was in the House 
at the time. Then, as now, the Republicans said they really cared about 
the deficit and the debt. Then, as now, they threatened that they 
wouldn't pay the bills on time. They wouldn't vote to pay the country's 
bills on time.
  I remember back then that we sat down with them in good faith. 
President Obama tapped Vice President Biden to lead the budget 
negotiations, and a small bipartisan and bicameral group of us was 
selected to try to hammer out a plan. I was part of those discussions. 
They took place just off the floor here, down the hall, less than 15 
yards away. We worked week after week after week, and we negotiated to 
try to hammer out an agreement.
  But here is what became very clear: The Republican objective then, as 
now, was not to reduce the deficit and the debt. The Republican 
objective was simply to cut investments in important areas. They didn't 
want to raise one penny--not one dime--to reduce the deficit or debt by 
closing tax breaks for very wealthy people. That was then. This is the 
same story today.
  If you look at the list of things they did back then--no cutting tax 
breaks for the wealthy, cutting important programs, including Medicare, 
were very much part of their agenda--we got very close to tripping over 
the final cliff of the debt ceiling. Like today, we had already hit the 
debt ceiling, and the Treasury Department was taking extraordinary 
measures to prevent us from actually defaulting on our debts. In fact, 
we got so close to actually not paying our bills on time that the S&P 
downgraded America's credit for the first time in our history. They 
said: You are getting very close to the place where creditors of the 
United States aren't going to anymore support the United States. They 
are not going to buy U.S. bonds. In fact, interest rates began to creep 
up just because of that when we got so close to the cliff. We came very 
close to going over that waterfall and crashing the economy.
  So many of us learned a valuable lesson that day. I learned it, and I 
know that then-Vice President, now-President Biden learned it, and that 
is that you don't negotiate over whether or not the United States pays 
its bills on time, because all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, 
have an obligation and a responsibility to do that.
  We also learned something I want to be equally clear about. We are 
not against negotiating about the budget. We are happy to sit down 
anytime with Republican colleagues and the Speaker of the House to 
negotiate all aspects of the budget. We can talk about spending levels, 
and we can talk about revenue levels. In fact, we have a budget process 
here. If Speaker McCarthy and his colleagues want to do this under the 
regular process and do it in a bipartisan way, they have to pass a 
budget resolution. They outline where they want to make cuts. I don't 
expect them to outline any proposed increases in revenue, but that is 
the place they would do that. Then we will have a debate. I serve on 
the Senate Budget Committee. I would look forward to that. I do look 
forward to that. I serve on the Appropriations Committee where we 
decide on expenditures. That is the forum for negotiation.
  The Democrats are for negotiating on the budget. We welcome that. 
Then the American people would see exactly what everyone's budget 
priorities are. They would see that the Republicans want to protect tax 
breaks for the very wealthy while they want to cut investments that are 
very important to middle America. They would see all of that during the 
budget process, but they want to short circuit that process. They, 
instead, want to say that they are not going to vote to pay our bills 
on time unless we all agree to their radical agenda. We are saying we 
are happy to negotiate--let's have a budget negotiation--but the 
negotiation isn't that you get everything you want in exchange for the 
Democrats' joining you to vote to pay our bills on time.
  We didn't do that when President Trump was in office. As I said, we 
voted three times to raise the debt limit. We didn't say: You have got 
to accept all of our proposed efforts to get rid of tax breaks for the 
very wealthy. Yet what they are saying is that we have got to accept 
their approach to deep cuts to important investments in order for them 
to do what all of us have an obligation under the Constitution to do, 
which is to pay our bills on time.
  So I hope all of us will do the simple thing--mandated in the 
Constitution--as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans. As 
Americans, let's pay our bills on time, and let's not crash our 
economy. Yes, as part of the normal budget process, let's have a 
conversation about spending and about revenue, but don't do it while, 
at the same time, you are saying you are not going to let the United 
States pay our bills on time.

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  As I said in my opening remarks, we have always paid our bills on 
time. If you don't do it, really bad things happen to all Americans. So 
let's get that done, and then let's have our conversation about budget 
priorities.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Cortez Masto). The Senator from Texas.

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