Alan Zendell, December 20, 2024

…I love my country more. Those were the words of a right-wing extremist in the House of Representatives, explaining why he voted against Trump’s insistence on suspending the debt ceiling for two years, as the price of keeping the government operating. That’s as positive a development as we could have hoped for, given Trump’s loud rhetoric about having absolute power and undermining the protections in the Constitution.

The debt ceiling, which for decades has been treated like a formality without real substance, is the maximum amount of debt the federal government can incur. It is set each year by Congress, although the White House usually makes its views on the subject clear. Why does Trump want to suspend it? In fact, he wants far more than to suspend it for two years – he wants to abolish it.

With no debt limit, the government could spend as much as it wished, without regard to how the debt would be paid off or how the interest on the debt would affect other discretionary spending on things like social security and health care. If our leaders always prioritized responsible spending and stabilizing the economy at all income levels, the question of doing away with the debt ceiling would never arise. In reality, however, most presidents have their own ideologies or agendas, and Trump’s depends on being completely unfettered in how he dispenses trillions of dollars, to whom, and for what.

Using Trump’s own promises, it’s perfectly clear that his top priority is renewing the 2017 tax cuts, 85% of which, according to most sources, benefitted the extremely wealthy. Trump believes in an oligarchal form of government, in which the wealthiest Americans have all the power, and almost all of the nation’s wealth. The clearest sign of this is the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, which would be headed by two billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami, who heavily financed Trump’s campaign and stand to profit hugely if the debt ceiling goes away.

The primary reason they want the debt limited suspended for two years until they can make it permanent is that the 2017 tax cuts added more than 3 trillion dollars to the national debt, and the cuts Trump would like to make to benefit the wealthy now would have a similar effect. The way the right wing plays the game, they would use the lack of a debt ceiling to borrow whatever they need to fund their government takeover, including passing additional tax cuts, raising the national debt so high that the interest on the debt alone would overwhelm most discretionary spending in the federal budget. According to Trump’s plan, when the Right started screaming about the size of the debt, Trump’s team would respond, claiming it was the only way they could, by killing off departments they don’t like (Education, Environmental Protection) and starving everything they consider entitlements (welfare, health care, child nutrition) by drastically slashing their budgets.

Had Congress caved on Trump’s demand, it would have been viewed as the first step in a successful dissolution of our representative government. The gloves would have instantly come off concerning Trump’s real intentions for the future of America. In my view, it would have resulted in a shockingly quick slide down the slippery slope into economic chaos and the death of the democracy we all grew up under.

My followers have noticed that I’ve been silent since a couple of weeks after the election. Like everyone else, I needed to take a step back, and there was so much was in flux, there wasn’t anything of substance to comment on. The one thing I was waiting to see was whether there was enough integrity left among Republicans in Congress for them to stand up for the Constitution every time Trump tried to weaken it. Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who despite his protestations, did more than anyone to enable Trump by stacking the federal courts with right-wing judges, uttered some unconvincing words about how being out of the leadership liberated him from having to support Trump. Senators John Thune and John Cronyn, who now lead the Senate Republicans, also took positive action to slow the Trump juggernaut by refusing to allow him to seat his Cabinet with recess appointments. One of the principal functions granted to the Senate by the Constitution was Advice and Consent on major presidential appointments.

I greeted the actions by the House and Senate with a cautious sigh of relief. It’s been clear since Election Day that the only defense against Trump consolidating more power than the Constitution allows was the courage and integrity of Congressional Republicans, despite the fact that all of them supported Trump. I’ve been waiting to hear the words, “I love Donald Trump but I love my country more.” Without them, I’d have found nothing worth writing about.