Senate Democrats on Tuesday announced that they would vote to raise the debt limit by $2.5 trillion hours before the country could potentially default, The New York Times reports.
The bill is expected to pass the 50-50 Senate down party lines with no Republicans expected to back the legislation.
But a deal hatched by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and backed by more than a dozen Senate Republicans allowed Democrats to hold the vote and avoid a filibuster.
The Treasury Department said it would not be able to borrow any more money after Wednesday.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the $2.5 trillion was enough to delay the next standoff over the debt ceiling until after next year’s midterm elections.
Graham criticizes McConnell:
Former President Donald Trump and his allies criticized McConnell for cutting a deal with Democrats.
“Mitch McConnell, the Broken Old Crow, has just conceded, for absolutely nothing and for no reason, the powerful Debt Ceiling negotiating block, which was the Republicans’ first-class ticket for victory over the Democrats,” Trump said. “He was afraid to play that card even though, without question, they would have completely FOLDED on the Build Back Worse Bill, which will destroy the fabric of our Country and virtually anything else that the Republicans wanted.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s top allies in the Senate, also criticized McConnell for the deal.
“What I’m worried about is that for four months the Republican Senate said we would not lift a finger to help the Democrats raise the debt ceiling. We would make them use reconciliation,” Graham said Sunday. “At the end, we did not make them use reconciliation, which changed the rules of the Senate in a House bill. I don’t like that a lot. … What we did is promised one thing and delivered another.”
GOP warns Dems ahead of next round:
With Republicans poised to recapture the House next year, Republicans are warning Democrats that the next standoff over the debt limit will be different.
“There needs to be at least some kind of negotiation in a bipartisan way for spending restraints,” Rep. Jason Smith, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, told The Washington Post. “The American people are tired of $7 trillion being spent in one year. There has to be spending cuts.”
“I would hope that what we would want is [what] the debt ceiling was designed to do, and that’s actually change the trajectory of where we are with debt and deficit,” added Sen. James Lankford. “If we’re not going to even discuss the trajectory of all this additional spending and additional debt piling up, why do we have it?”
