Debt Ceiling

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, here is a quote to start the day:

I do think we're in very serious danger of repeating almost all the mistakes of the 1960s and early 1970s.

That is Larry Summers, the senior advisor to two Democratic Presidents, about the risk of inflation we face today.

As one report explained:

The former Treasury secretary has been warning since February that President Joe Biden's big-spending agenda was creating the risk of an inflation spike this year, potentially cutting into the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Oh, but Washington Democrats have spent trillions--trillions--of dollars on pet liberal projects. They have been printing and wasting money like there is no tomorrow, and American families are hurting as a result.

Inflation has more than overtaken the average worker's wage growth since last year. Employers are raising wages higher and higher, but their workers' paychecks go less and less far. Families' incomes and savings are eroding right before their eyes.

Democrats have done this proudly--proudly--on a party-line basis. Back in 2020, during the teeth of the COVID emergency, Congress worked across party lines to pass massive rescue packages that Republicans and Democrats had written together. Virtually every serious expert agreed that after the last relief bill that we passed in December, the economy was primed and ready to go.

But our Democratic colleagues wanted more. Like they admitted from the start of the pandemic, they wanted to use the crisis to ``restructure things to fit [their] vision'' [from a temporary emergency to permanent socialism].

They bragged the bipartisan bill they passed in March was the most leftwing legislation in American history. Now they want to dwarf that bill with a reckless taxing-and-spending spree that would cost trillions more and bury the country in job-killing tax hikes.

When it comes to spending and the economy, President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, and the Democratic leader have made a conscious decision: They don't want Republican-governing partners. They want to go it alone. Well, with one exception--just one exception.

No, Republicans won't have any input into the massive, reckless taxing-and-spending spree that will stick middle-class families with higher costs, lower wages, and a socialist country they didn't vote for.

But Democrats do want Republicans' help with just one thing. They want us to help raise the credit limit to make it happen. They want us to help clear the path for their partisan, job-killing agenda, which we oppose.

So let's make this perfectly clear, in case anybody is in doubt. The debt suspension that just expired in August automatically covered the borrowing that had been accumulated before that date. This is the discussion about the future. This isn't the last 4 years, when we were reaching bipartisan government funding agreements, bipartisan appropriations, and bipartisan COVID bills.

Democrats have made a different choice. They want to make policy all by themselves. So they can come up with the financing on their own as well. The Democratic leaders have every tool and procedure they need to handle the debt limit on a partisan basis, just like they are choosing to handle everything else.

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