How Senate Republicans are going to make the next weeks and months hell for all of us
The fight for the nation to have a functioning government and a stable global economy starting Oct. 1 have begun. The debt ceiling, government funding, trying to save democracy and maybe even do something about climate—it's all happening in the next several weeks and it's not going to be pretty. That's because of the death cult nihilists that have half the Senate, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the guy who actually relishes having the nickname "Grim Reaper."
Let's try to make some sense of everything and how all these moving parts of government are supposed to work. Or not.
The debt ceiling is as good a place to start as any. Congress decided the nation had to have a debt ceiling—a limit on how much debt the Treasury can borrow on behalf of the public—back in 1917 as a way for the Congress to take on public debt to finance government operations and obligations. It was a way to provide blanket authorization for spending so it wouldn't have to authorize specific loans or give the Treasury permission to issue debt instruments—bonds—for every single spending need, including loan obligations to other nations. What was intended to be a means of making government and Congress more efficient of course became a periodic weapon. Under McConnell, it has become a hostage.
In 2019, everyone—even Republicans—rightly thought it would be a good idea to not let the former guy in the White House have that weapon, so they suspended the debt ceiling. They said, basically, whatever Treasury has to do for the next two years is fine with us, we don't need to set that limit. Republicans being Republicans and Democrats letting them get away with it, they decided the thing to do was put that weapon in storage until the middle of the next president's first, critical year in office. Just a little time bomb for what might be a Democratic president next time around—which went off very quietly over the weekend on July 31 when the suspension expired.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/5/2044041/-Debit-ceilings-and-budgets-and-continuing-resolutions-oh-my
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