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Maybe that's not the worst thing that could happen. Congress has refused at least eight times over the past 40 years to increase debt limits, without immediate fiscal disaster (although that might be because the debt ceiling always was raised eventually). Back when Barack Obama was a senator in 2006, he voted against an increase. "The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure," he proclaimed — for the government is "shifting the burden of the bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren." Just five years later, such talk would win him cheers at a Tea Party rally.
Bag of tricks
For that matter, the Treasury has a number of tricks it can use to stave off default: draw down the $200 billion Supplementary Financing Program, issue some cash-management bills, sneak a little out of the $118 billion employee pension G-Fund, sell off more of those ridiculous TARP investments — to name just a few.
Even so, DeMint's comments are more than a little disturbing. It's not our fault, he insists. The Democrats did it. Most of us weren't even here when it happened. You've heard that whine before: on the playground, or in a squabble after school. It is the cry of a child who thinks it's just not fair he has to clean up someone else's mess. And maybe it really isn't fair. But we have a name for those who don't whine this way — a name for those who shoulder responsibility in a world they never made. We call them grown-ups, and with their new congressional power, the time has come for the Republicans to start acting, and speaking, like adults.
A shared responsibility
Our national debts "are legal obligations," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wrote to Congress recently. "Responsibility for meeting the nation's obligations must be shared by both parties." Let's not pretend he isn't playing politics, too. Geithner urged Congress in his letter to raise the debt ceiling immediately, and what he's probably hoping is that the debate doesn't last long enough for Republicans to pry budget concessions out of the Democrats.
Nonetheless, it's curious that Geithner sounds like a conservative in all this, while DeMint sounds like a radical. Such arguments are nothing new in America. Back in 1789, for instance, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had a fascinating exchange of letters on the subject.
It was Jefferson, at his most wild-eyed and radical, who argued that we cannot bind future generations, or future political leaders, to pay back debts. And it was Madison, at his most serious and conservative, who replied that old commitments "form a debt against the living, who take the benefit of them. This debt can not be otherwise discharged than by a proportionate obedience to the will of the authors of the improvements."
Is it too much to ask conservatives today to side with Madison in these debates? Is it too much to ask them, now that they again hold power in the House, to be a little more grown-up?
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
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