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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) urged conservative House Republicans on Tuesday to continue pushing GOP leaders to insist on spending reductions as any new agreement to raise the federal borrowing limit, putting him at odds with some conservatives who said earlier that doing so would just amount to “political theater.”“Of course the debt ceiling should be used to enact structural spending reforms to fix the problem, to fix the out of control spending and debt. That’s what all of our constituents expect and it’s what every member of this body tells our constituents we will do. I guarantee you,” Cruz said.The...

That rumor has been flying around, in part due to the natural opacity of last-minute deals struck at the eleventh hour of a “crisis.”  The legislative branch controls the debt ceiling, but Democrats have occasionally proposed to either eliminate it altogether or allow the executive to set it — at least when a Democrat is President.  So what exactly did the Reid-McConnell bill do to the debt ceiling?  Politico has the source of some confusion on this at the bottom of their story: The legislation also includes a McConnell-written proposal that would allow Congress to disapprove of the debt-ceiling increase....

With the federal government on the brink of a default, a House Republican effort to end the shutdown and extend the Treasury’s borrowing authority collapsed Tuesday night as a major credit agency warned that the United States was on the verge of a costly ratings downgrade.

Sarah Palin Obama’s Debt Default is on His Shoulders While We Shoulder His Impeachable Offenses Apparently the president thinks he can furlough reality when talking about the debt limit. To suggest that raising the debt limit doesn’t incur more debt is laughably absurd. The very reason why you raise the debt limit is so that you can incur more debt. Otherwise what’s the point? It’s also shameful to see him scaremongering the markets with his talk of default. There is no way we can default if we follow the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4, requires that we service our...

March 16, 2006 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD—SENATE S2237-2238: “Mr. OBAMA. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about America’s debt problem. The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. Over the past 5 years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is ‘‘trillion’’ with a ‘‘T.’’ That is money that we...

First of all, nobody believes the government does not have enough money to pay down its debt. We would just have to stop doing things like feeding lazy losers. But what if we DID default? What if there was a cash-flow problem that caused FedZilla to miss a bond payment or two? Well, that would be a GOOD thing for us small-government conservatives. FedZilla loses its credit rating and cannot BORROW anymore. What could be better? We should all be WISHING for that!

Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Susan Collins are doing their best to complicate everything and shill for K Street. I am actually surprised Paul Ryan could be diverted from amnesty long enough to ensure Obamacare is fully funded. But he has. The House should act very simply — pass a debt limit increase. Pass it so it goes through Christmas. There is no point trying to do negotiations over the holidays. Then let Harry Reid reject it. Harry Reid is banking on the media being in his pocket the whole time. And they are and will be right up until...

Senate Republicans on Saturday blocked a bid by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to extend the nation’s debt limit until after the 2014 midterm elections. In an 53-45 vote, the Senate failed to win the 60 votes necessary to advance the debt-limit measure to a floor debate. The bill would increase the federal debt by an estimated $1.1 trillion. Every Democrat supported the measure, though Reid switched his vote at the end to preserve the right to bring the motion up for another vote later. Republicans criticized the legislation as politically transparent. Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) and two other...

12:00 noon The Senate began a 15 minute roll call vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to S.1569, a bill to ensure the complete and timely payment of the obligations of the United States Government until December 31, 2014; Not Invoked: 53-45Senator Reid changed his vote to no and entered a motion to reconsider the failed cloture vote at a later time.

Senate Democratic unity will face a test Saturday when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) moves forward with a plan to pass a 14-month debt-ceiling extension. The unity of the 54-member caucus has been Reid’s biggest asset in his showdown with House Republicans. Senate Democrats have voted together to reject various House proposals to link legislation unraveling ObamaCare to a government funding stopgap. If Reid keeps his rank-and-file members together, it would strengthen Democrats’ leverage in negotiations to avoid a federal default later this month. But the vote presents a political risk to red state Democrats who are undecided over...

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Saturday morning is set to brief House Republicans on the status of negotiations with the White House to end the government shutdown and lift the debt ceiling. Congressional leaders left the Capitol on Friday evening with no agreement to resolve the standoff, just six days before the Treasury Department says the debt ceiling will be reached and warns of an unprecedented U.S. default..... At the White House, press secretary Jay Carney said Obama had "some concerns" about the GOP's latest proposal, and he signaled Obama would not support a plan that tied only a short-term...

House Republicans say they'll go for a temporary extension of the debt ceiling in exchange for a "real commitment" from President Obama and Democrats to talk about the nation's pressing problems. At a news conference Thursday morning, House Speaker John Boehner said Republicans are ready to "move half way -- half way to what (Obama's) demanded." [snip] - See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/boehner-will-lift-debt-limit-now-if-obama-will-talk-later#sthash.vzfaeZe4.dpuf

Senate Republicans are unhappy with a House GOP plan to raise the debt ceiling for six weeks without funding the federal government — and are coalescing around their own proposal to pair a short-term debt-ceiling increase with a year-long stopgap spending bill. Under their plan, government would be funded for a year at the $967 billion level set by the 2011 Budget Control Act. The package would also include a repeal of ObamaCare's medical-device tax and language to require income verification of people who apply for healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, say GOP sources familiar with the talks....

But the White House spokesman reiterated the president will not offer concessions "in return for Congress doing its job." President Obama "would likely sign" a clean bill that raised the debt ceiling for six weeks, White House press secretary Jay Carney said. But the White House reiterated that the president was not going to offer concessions "in return for Congress doing its job," further indication that Obama would not negotiate on the budget until the government was reopened. Carney said it would be "unsustainably bad" policy to allow allow Republicans to use the shutdown as "leverage" to extract concessions, chiding...

Senate Democrats say any short-term debt-limit increase should also reopen the government and may reject a House GOP proposal to extend the nation’s debt ceiling by a few weeks. [snip] Reid said he would proceed with his plan to push the expiration of the debt limit until Dec. 31, 2014. Reid has scheduled a Saturday vote on a motion to proceed to the 14-month debt-limit extension. It would, in effect, allow the administration to increase its borrowing authority by an estimated $1.1 trillion. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) panned the proposal. “The majority leader introduced legislation this week to...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a shift some Republicans hope will strengthen their hand in the fight over the U.S. debt limit, some of the party's leaders in the House of Representatives are playing down demands to weaken "Obamacare" and focusing instead on calls to rein in deficits. The emphasis on tackling long-term debt and deficits was evident in opinion pieces published on Wednesday by two of the most prominent House Republicans, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a former vice presidential candidate. Ryan's piece in the Wall Street Journal failed to...

A national network reporter, during an interview about about the government shutdown, actually told me: "Democrats believe government should do some things. Republicans don't believe government should be doing anything." Where had we heard that characterization of the GOP? "'Anarchist'? Why in the world wouldn't I use the term anarchy?" said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in a CNN interview. "That's what they are. They're anarchists. They don't believe in government -- at any level. ... They're anarchists, just like they were at the beginning of the 20th century. ... They're not blowing up buildings and they're not killing...

Senate Republicans plan to block Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) bid to push the debt limit until Dec. 31, 2014, increasing the nation’s borrowing authority by an estimated $1.1 trillion.Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), a pivotal centrist Republican, on Wednesday called Reid’s legislation “politically transparent.” “We just do a clean increase for the next year to get us beyond the election? I’m sorry. We’re asking for transparency around here, but that’s about as politically transparent as anything I can think of,” she said. The Senate Republican caucus now seems near unanimous that Reid is playing political games. And that likely...

Please note that the current debt limit is $16.699 trillion. Debt to the Penny Interestingly, the US Treasury website Debt to the Penny and Who Hold It shows the current public debt as 16,747,429,285,635.12 (the same as Nick shows in the above chart). Treasury Stops Updating National Debt You do not have to be a math genius to figure out that "debt to the penny" already exceeds the debt limit. I asked Nick about that and he replied ... Since mid-May, "debt to the penny" hasn't been rising. When they postponed raising the debt limit they stopped showing any increase...

............Congressional Democrats are generally pleased that Reid has been calling the shots. They claim that Obama did not cut a good deal during the last debt-limit debate in 2011.Now,Obama is front and center again. His press conference with reporters,which lasted more than an hour, was his first since the government shuttered last week.Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin(Ill.)has criticized a short-term debt-limit increase as merely lurching to the next crisis.“We’re not going to be in the situation where you’re lurching from crisis to crisis and putting the full faith and credit[of the government]at the hands of a Republican caucus that can’t...