You can’t undo what’s been done. Maybe Chuck Schumer should have forced a government shutdown by filibuster. But that chapter is in the past. Looking down the road, the next big conflict on the horizon involves the debt ceiling. This week, the Congressional Budget Office will release its latest report on the debt limit, at which point it’s expected it will offer an estimate for the so-called “X-date”—the day after which the government cannot continue funding itself without an agreement to raise the debt ceiling.
Democrats will face a choice: Should they take a stand against an increase in the debt limit in the House or not? To let the House take the lead here may be a misplaced sense of constitutional principle. Still, the Framers intended the House, not the Senate, to check the impulse to monarchy, and it was their original intent, so to speak, that a populist House and not the aristocratic Senate should engage in this kind of action.
There was always a case against the Democrats supporting a government shutdown. First and foremost, they are the party of government. Shutting the government down would have been a betrayal of these principles, as well as an act of weakness. It would be like telling Trump: “If you don’t stop, I will blow myself up. Because you are attacking federal employees, we Democrats will lay off all of them. Because you are cutting some programs, we will halt all of them.” A shutdown over the budget makes sense for the GOP, but it makes no sense, even in the face of demented behavior, for the party of the government. Instead of helping the people we mean to serve—the poor, the weak, the vulnerable—we would have been taking them hostage until Trump cut a deal to free them.
In other words, we would have inflicted all the harm on our own constituents and not on the wealthy elites who are bankrolling Trump.
But opposing an increase of the debt limit? That would be taking a different set of hostages. This would threaten catastrophe first and foremost on the plutocratic class who have proportionately the most to lose from a drop in equities and the panic in the bond market that would ensue. Naturally, some middle-class people own stocks and bonds as well, but they do not own as many of these assets as the high-rolling elites who largely empower Trump’s misrule. If the United States ran out of cash to pay creditors, and no deal was in sight, my bet is that the plutocracy would use its clout to force the party of capital, the GOP, to relent.
Let’s review the facts. The debt limit is now back in effect. The secretary of the treasury is already taking extraordinary measures to keep things afloat. Between now and early summer, Congress will have to authorize a rise in the debt ceiling. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson theoretically has a majority capable of passing a debt ceiling lift, lickety-split. But the thin margins of that majority do him no favors, and for many members of the so-called Freedom Caucus, agreeing to lift the debt ceiling crosses a red line, abrogating a promise that they swore in their campaigns they would keep. If the speaker loses even two Freedom Caucus members, the Democrats can block an increase, simply by not voting to give Johnson a clean rise. Consider this possibility too: Because of the chaos Trump and Musk have created at the IRS, there may be a fall-off of 10 percent, or $500 billion, in federal tax revenue. That means the Freedom Caucus, sworn not to raise the debt, will have to blow the debt ceiling on a scale that will give cardiac arrest even in the red states. At this point, Democratic votes must come with strings attached in the form of the major concessions that the Senate balked at asking for during the shutdown fight.
Here is a far better place to take a stand against Trump. For one thing, it inflicts its first lash of pain on the wealthy, not the poor. If there is a default, the immediate shock will be to the stock and bond markets, not to people on food stamps. Naturally, if the default continues for months, it will wreck the economy, but it is a reasonable strategy in a game of chicken that in the midst of a worldwide panic, those with money and power would make sure that Trump and the Democrats reached a deal.
But Trump would have to give up something as well. What would be the price?
The scuppering of Elon Musk’s DOGE project is the paramount ask. Another key demand: Suspend the plan to extend the tax cuts. And since we’ve terminated DOGE, we need no longer accept the rampant DOGE-logic of massive cuts to key programs, including what Musk has characterized as “fraud-ridden” Social Security, to pay for them. While the rich may not like it, paying down the debt by holding off the tax cuts now planned for them will protect their investments as well. After all, the debt is unsustainable: The Treasury market has doubled in size in the last decade. Extending the cuts for the rich as Trump and the GOP now plan will add $6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. Nothing DOGE has done so far comes even close to justifying the extension of these tax cuts.
The public, who are as eager to soak the rich as ever, are ready for the messaging: Let Elon Musk and his friends pay down the deficit.
So long as Trump decides he can cut what Congress appropriates, stopping the extension of the tax cuts is the only deal the Democrats can enforce against him. Even if they raise the limit, Trump would renege on that deal as well. But in this case, the Democrats can just suspend the ceiling for this year with the proviso that it drops back into effect if the tax cuts are restored. I need not say, I hope, that the Democrats would only stop the extension of the cuts to the very rich, not the very modest cuts that went in at the same time for the middle class.
Trump has already declared that he may let the default happen should Congress fail to raise the ceiling. Fine: Let him. Let people see he is raising debt and causing a financial crisis. Put Trump in the impossible position that Democrats flirted with putting themselves in during the shutdown fight.
It remains a possibility that the GOP may stay united, and the Freedom Caucus may join with the rest to vote to raise the debt limit. The Democrats will have still rebranded themselves as the party that would save the country by taxing the rich. That’s what the public will remember.
In the meantime, it’s time to start running ads in the home districts of the Freedom Caucus members, to blast them for voting to increase the debt in the continuing resolution, and warn that they will soon be increasing the debt limit too. We should get the message out to the country now, ahead of the vote to increase the debt limit: It is time to start paying down the debt that’s fueling inflation. And that Musk and the plutocrats—not people on Social Security and Medicare—should be the Americans who pay.
Democrats should screw their courage to the sticking place. A default, long before it starts to hurt the rest of the country, will end very quickly. Wall Street will make sure of that. And for the first time, the Democrats can inflict real pain on Trump.
