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G.O.P. Spending Hawks Defy Trump on the Debt Limit, Previewing More Clashes
President-elect Donald J. Trump is known for his tight grip on members of his party, but the rare rejection of his demand to suspend the debt limit reflected a disconnect that could plague his policy agenda.
Catie Edmondson and Andrew Duehren
Reporting from the Capitol
Something unusual happened this week after President-elect Donald J. Trump ordered House Republicans to back legislation raising the debt limit: Dozens refused.
It was a rare breach by a group of Republicans who have traditionally backed Mr. Trump’s policy preferences unquestioningly and taken pains to avoid defying him.
And it laid bare a disconnect between Mr. Trump and his party that could upend their efforts next year to pass transformative tax and domestic policy legislation with the tiniest of majorities. Even as Mr. Trump has displayed a laissez-faire attitude to the federal debt and a willingness to spend freely, a number of lawmakers in his party fervently adhere to an anti-spending philosophy that regards debt as disastrous.
In this week’s spending bill fight, Mr. Trump was intent on trying to absolve himself of responsibility for dealing with the debt ceiling, which is expected to be reached sometime in January. Raising it while President Biden was still in office and Democrats still held the Senate, he apparently believed, could avoid a messy internal Republican fight over the issue next year when Mr. Trump is in the White House and his party in full control of Congress.
Instead, he only accelerated that clash, which unfolded on the House floor on Thursday night when 38 Republicans refused to suspend the borrowing limit without spending cuts.
They tanked a spending plan that would have deferred the debt cap for two years, and by Friday, when Speaker Mike Johnson advanced a third proposal to avert a shutdown to the House floor, they had jettisoned the debt limit measure entirely, promising instead to deal with it next year.
That version passed the House on Friday evening with bipartisan support, before the Senate followed suit early Saturday and sent it to Mr. Biden for his expected signature. The only lawmakers voting to oppose it in the House — all 34 of them — were Republicans.
“To take this bill, to take this bill yesterday, and congratulate yourself because it’s shorter in pages, but increases the debt by $5 trillion, is asinine,” Representative Chip Roy of Texas said on Thursday night in a scathing speech deriding the legislation carrying the debt limit increase. “I’m absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go forward to the American people and say you think this is fiscally responsible.”
Mr. Trump has never taken up the traditional spending hawk talking points that have long defined the Republican Party and became the dogma of the Tea Party wave of 2010. He has floated getting rid of the debt limit altogether — a stance embraced more by progressive Democrats than members of his own party — and once proudly declared himself “the king of debt.” He told “CBS This Morning” that he had “made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt.”
During his first administration, Mr. Trump approved $8.8 trillion of gross new borrowing and $443 billion of deficit reduction, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He saw a political upside to free-spending policies, including sending out stimulus checks stamped with his signature. And he pledged never to touch Social Security, breaking with G.O.P. fiscal hawks who have long called for overhauling the program to rein in its unsustainable costs.
On the campaign trail this past cycle, he floated a flurry of far-reaching policies with potentially hefty price tags, including exempting certain forms of pay from taxes.
But even as the Republican Party has evolved to absorb Mr. Trump’s views, a critical mass of lawmakers in his party — particularly hard-liners in the House — say that the No. 1 reason they ran for Congress was to tackle the problem of the nation’s ballooning debt. They have pledged not to vote for anything that would increase spending or the country’s borrowing limit without commensurate cuts.
Some Republicans fell in line on Thursday night and swallowed their objections to raising the debt limit. Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado said she largely favored the bill in support of Mr. Trump.
“I did not want to see a failure on the House floor for the first demand that President Trump was making,” she said.
But House Republicans’ tiny majority in both this Congress and the next means that even a small bloc of virulently anti-debt conservatives can sink critical legislation.
A New York Times analysis of votes on spending bills since 2011 found that hard-right lawmakers associated with the Freedom Caucus have voted in favor of government funding bills less than 20 percent of the time. A smaller group of ultraconservative members has almost always voted against appropriations bills — in an average of 93 percent of cases.
It was that group of lawmakers that revolted against Mr. Trump's call this week to raise the debt limit without any cuts in exchange.
Representative Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, who once held four town halls with constituents across his sprawling district in one day to talk about the national debt, said that when he cast his vote against the legislation, he was thinking about “all Oklahoma families, farmers and ranchers who lost approximately 20 percent of their purchasing power since 2020 because of Congress’s continual deficit spending.”
Others said there were limits to Mr. Trump’s clout on the issue.
“President Trump has a lot of sway with Republicans, obviously,” said Representative Bob Good of Virginia, who is leaving Congress at the end of the year after losing a primary to a Trump-backed challenger. “Things that he says, I’m sure, have influence on individuals. But the House needs to operate as the House. I think it would have been a terrible decision to raise the debt limit without really meaningful spending cuts and structured fiscal reform.”
Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri said even his affection for the president-elect could not sway him to break a promise to his constituents.
“When I ran for office, I said I would not vote to raise the debt ceiling,” he told CNN. “I’ve never voted to raise the debt ceiling. I love Donald Trump, but he didn’t vote me into office; my district did.”
In an attempt to appease both those lawmakers and Mr. Trump — and to try to win the support to pass a stopgap spending bill — House Republican leaders on Friday floated a pledge to cut spending and raise the debt limit in separate legislation next year. Republicans have been preparing to pass party-line legislation through a fast-track process called reconciliation — a procedure leaders said Friday could be used next year to address Mr. Trump’s demand to raise the debt limit.
That could introduce its own set of problems.
Roughly two-thirds of the money the federal government spends every year takes the form of “mandatory spending” — largely on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — that Congress does not need to approve every year. Mr. Trump has promised not to cut Social Security and Medicare, which pays for health care for older Americans.
That leaves Medicaid, a health care program for low-income people that makes up about 10 percent of the federal budget. Republicans have already been discussing ways to make cuts to the program, including requiring people to prove they work to receive coverage.
That promise will join cutting taxes, cracking down on immigration and allowing for more oil drilling on the G.O.P. agenda for next year. Republicans in the House and Senate have been at odds over how to tackle those priorities, with some senators pushing for multiple bills and House members demanding one huge effort.
This week’s ugly infighting showed that even one such vote could be an exceedingly heavy lift.
Already right-wing lawmakers in the Freedom Caucus are insisting that any costs incurred by extending the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 will need to be offset by additional spending cuts to win their support.
Those types of reductions could run into a buzz saw among more mainstream Republicans, particularly those in competitive races who will be loath to defend approving major cuts to programs their constituents use.
Balancing it all, Representative Jodey C. Arrington of Texas, the chairman of the Budget Committee, conceded on Friday, is only going to get more difficult when the Republican majority shrinks even further next year.
But, he said, Republicans had won “an imperative window for righting the ship. And that’s why the stakes are higher now.”
Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times. More about Catie Edmondson
Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington. More about Andrew Duehren
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