From the DailyCaller.com:
There’s no actual debt ceiling right now
by Alex Pappas
There’s no actual debt ceiling right now.
The fiscal deal
passed by Congress on Wednesday evening to re-open the government and get around the $16.4 trillion limit on borrowing doesn’t actually increase the debt limit. It just temporarily suspends enforcement of it.
That means Americans have no idea how much debt their government is going to rack up between now and Feb. 7, when the limits are supposed to go back into place and will have to be raised.
There is no dollar amount set for how much debt the government can accumulate between now and then. The suspension strategy was employed first earlier this year during previous fiscal battles in Congress.
The nasty little truth that no one will tell you. Plus: what’s actually in the bill?
Looks like the “stopgap bill” is packed with pork.
From the WashingtonTimes.com:
That’s rich! Sen. Lautenberg’s millionaire widow pockets $174K in shutdown deal
Buried inside the new stopgap spending bill are several goodies, including nearly quadrupling the maximum price of a dam project on the Ohio River that is turning into a boondoggle — up to nearly $3 billion.
The bill also includes $174,000 of taxpayer money for the widow of the late Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg. The death gratuity, which has been paid to widows of other lawmakers in the past, raised hackles since Lautenberg was a multimillionaire, while the government is $16.7 trillion in debt.
Are you serious? Are the Demorats and the Republicans pressing porkish fluff into what is perceived as an Emergency Bill to “keep America solvent”?
In one word: yes.
Thank God there’s a semblance of sanity within:
But lawmakers did nix one provision that was in an early draft posted online — they canceled authority to build another Coast Guard cutter, as a cost of nearly $600 million.
Wow. I was sweating that one. Far be it from us to approve the construction of something as trite and unneeded as another stupid and unnecessary USCG ship.
Included in the measure is money to pay back all of the states that signed agreements funding national parks within their borders during the shutdown — with interest.
Payback with interest. How generous. With YOUR hard-earned money.
The measure also repays all federal employees for the days the government was shutdown, including the hundreds of thousands who were furloughed and didn’t work.
Hello? Government Welfare? Getting paid to not work? What kind of a wonderful deal is that?
It also:
-Lets the Defense Department continue assisting African forces pursue Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group accused of atrocities.
Right. In a “last ditch moment” bill designed to keep the government running.
My Congressman, Tom McClintock, wrote:
The debt limit exists for a simple reason: to assure that public debt isn’t recklessly piled up without Congress periodically acknowledging it and addressing the spending patterns that are causing it. If a debt limit increase is supposed to be automatic, as the President suggests, there really is no purpose to it.
A new dimension has now appeared in this discussion. Unlike every one of his predecessors, this President has vowed that unless Congress unconditionally raises the debt limit, the United States will default on its sovereign debt.
The President has been ruthless and vindictive in the way he has handled the shutdown, refusing House leadership’s offers along the way. I now believe that this President would willfully act to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States unless the Congress acquiesces to all of his demands. His every statement and action is consistent with this conclusion.
If the Republicans acquiesce, the immediate crisis will quickly vanish, credit markets will calm and public life will return to other matters. But a fundamental element of our Constitution will have been destroyed and a perilous era will have begun.
And that did occur. In the hindsight of this article, the Republicans did in fact “cave.”
The power of the purse will have shifted from the representatives of the people to the executive, in which the President sets spending levels and vetoes any bill falling short of his demands. Whenever a deadline approaches, one house can simply refuse to negotiate with the other until Congress is faced with the Hobson’s choice of a shut-down or a default.
But here’s the point:
The nation’s spending will again dangerously accelerate, the deficit will again rapidly widen, and the economic prosperity of the nation will continue to slowly bleed away.
This impasse may have started as a dispute over a collapsing health program but it has now taken on the dimensions of a constitutional crisis.
You and I both know this is true.
BZ
P.S.
McClintock and Sean Hannity audio here.
McClintock and Mark Levin audio here.
