U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., and 313 of her colleagues supported a debt ceiling deal Wednesday night that included major Democratic concessions but skirted a catastrophic default. The bill now heads to the Senate, where Vermont’s U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch have pledged to vote no and yes, respectively.
“They were bad choices,” Balint told VTDigger of the vote in an interview Thursday morning. “That’s what I need people to understand.”
With lawmakers and economists biting their nails as a June 5 deadline to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, or face default, quickly approached, Democratic President Joe Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Saturday struck a high-stakes deal.
On the line was a potential economic catastrophe: Without legislation to raise the debt ceiling, the U.S. government would default on its debt obligations, likely plunging the nation into recession and imperiling funding for its most basic functions, including government programs like Medicare, Social Security and veterans benefits.
With an unruly Republican majority holding control of the House, Biden and fellow Democrats made major concessions to appease a caucus intent upon injecting conservative social policy into the spending package.
Included in the final deal are inflation-adjusted domestic spending cuts, the imposition of new work requirements for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) beneficiaries, the reinstatement of federal student loan payments after a more-than-three-year hiatus, expedited permits to construct a West Virginia natural gas pipeline fiercely opposed by environmentalists and more.
Balint equated her vote to choosing the lesser of two evils. Republicans had taken the economy hostage, she said, and “nothing great comes of hostage negotiations.”
“I had two choices before me, both of them bad — one catastrophic, and one distasteful,” Balint said. “So I went with the distasteful one.”
In the three days that elapsed until the House ultimately voted 314-117 on the deal late Wednesday, Balint — Vermont’s lone, first-term House member — teeter-tottered back and forth on whether she’d cast a yea or a nay, she recounted to VTDigger the morning after the vote.
When she first heard the broad strokes of the deal during a Sunday briefing, she said she thought “the damage could have been much worse,” given Republicans’ initial list of demands, and was leaning toward voting yes. Come Monday, as more details emerged, she began to sway in the other direction. By Tuesday, she told Vermont Public, she was “leaning no.”
Come Wednesday morning, Balint said she and other Democrats attended a two-hour briefing with White House officials, during which she changed her tune. Given that Democrats are in the minority — “an uncomfortable place to be” — Balint said she came away thinking that “the president and his negotiators actually did a really great job.”
That doesn’t mean she’s happy with the final product of the deal — but she pointed her finger at Republicans for the pain she said she knows will ensue as a result of the bill.
“Do I know that some people are going to have long-term, hard impacts on their lives because of what the Republicans have done? Absolutely,” Balint said. “But the alternative was much worse.”
When it came time to cast her vote, she said, she was at least pleased that the deal struck raises the debt ceiling for not one, but two years — staving off a similar standoff during next year’s presidential election campaign season, when political tensions are at their peak.
The battle over the debt ceiling has dragged on for months, and some Democrats have voiced regrets for not preemptively tackling the issue while they held both chambers of Congress last year (before Balint arrived in Washington). But as for conservatives’ ability to hijack what she said should have been a purely fiscal debate, Balint pointed to McCarthy’s tumultuous rise to the Speaker’s dais in January.
“This is the result of those 15 rounds of votes we had for the speaker,” Balint said. “The extremists were driving the conversation then. The extremists are driving the conversation now. So in order for McCarthy to become speaker, he had to make a whole bunch of side agreements… He gave over a lot of power to the extremists in order for him to have the gavel.”
Balint said the schism within the Republican Party was apparent Wednesday when dozens of Republicans refused to vote “yes” on a procedural vote to even take up the bill — forcing Democratic lawmakers to double back and change their own votes to “yes” so that debate could proceed. “That was a really clear indication to me about the Republican conference not only being incredibly extreme, but also chaotic,” Balint said.
She had already made up her mind to vote “yes” on the bill by that point, but watching the GOP splinter on the procedural vote, Balint said she was assured “that the stakes were incredibly high, and that I could not at all gamble with Social Security benefits, Medicaid benefits — because that’s what would happen if we were to default.”
Ultimately, 71 House Republicans voted against McCarthy’s deal, adamant that the spending cuts did not go deep enough. More Democrats, 165, voted “yea” than Republicans, 149.
Now the bill heads over to the closely divided Senate, where Vermont’s senior senator Sanders and junior senator Welch have pledged to vote no and yes, respectively.
In a lengthy written statement issued Wednesday evening, Sanders said, “The best thing to be said about the current deal on the debt ceiling is that it could have been much worse.”
“Deficit reduction cannot just be about cutting programs that working families, the children, the sick, the elderly, and the poor depend upon,” Sanders said. “It must be about demanding that the billionaire class and profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes, reining in out-of-control military spending, reducing the price of prescription drugs, and ending billions of dollars in corporate welfare that goes to the fossil fuel industry and other corporate interests.”
Welch, on the other hand, said in a written statement Thursday afternoon that the stakes are too high to risk defaulting.
“America has always paid its bills — in full and on time. We must continue to do so,” Welch said. “Default would be catastrophic to Vermont families, communities, to our country, and America’s standing in the world.”
With the caveat that he said he must review any amendments made to the House bill, Welch said, “I fully expect to vote yes to make certain America preserves our historic commitment to meet its obligations.”
Sanders, meanwhile, asserted that “this bill is totally unnecessary” for the nation to meet its debt obligations. He argued that Biden could invoke the 14th amendment to eliminate the debt ceiling without having to entertain House Republicans’ policy demands.
“I look forward to the day when he exercises this authority and puts an end, once and for all, to the outrageous actions of the extreme right-wing to hold our entire economy hostage in order to get what they want,” Sanders said.