McConnell obviously wants to make Democrats cast a series of votes to raise the debt ceiling. Surely he is thinking in particular of the first four, the red-staters. But here’s the part I don’t get. Under the rule he proposes, if President Obama puts forward a certain list of possible budget cuts in exchange for raising the ceiling, a two-thirds vote in both houses would be required to block it. In other words, Democrats wouldn’t need 60 votes to break a filibuster to support an Obama plan to raise the limit, as they normally would. They wouldn’t even need 51. They’d need just 34! So all four red-state Democrats, and the other three, can spend the next year and a half voting against raising the debt limit under the McConnell scheme, inveighing thunderously against Washington’s louche ways. The only Democrats who need to vote to raise the limit are those not facing reelection, and a small number of those facing only token opposition. So this puts no one on the hot seat in a way that matters.
In fact, as David Dayen has pointed out on the American Prospect website, Democrats could conceivably finagle things such that nobody has to vote for it at all. “Under the right circumstances,” he writes, “Obama could let Congress go into recess while the resolution of disapproval is at his desk and not sign it, a maneuver known as a pocket veto. A pocket veto cannot be overridden.” Which is to say, there need be no vote, period.
