> Newly empowered House Republicans have vowed that they will not raise the borrowing limit again unless President Biden agrees to steep cuts in federal spending. Mr. Biden has said he will not negotiate conditions for a debt-limit increase, arguing that lawmakers should lift the cap with no strings attached to cover spending that previous Congresses authorized.

People arguing for raising the debt limit without a fight are completely missing the point. The whole point of the law is to create a point of leverage for measures to cut spending. Negotiations for future spending cuts is exactly what Congress envisioned when they created the debt limit. It’s a system that forces Congress to pump the brakes on spending.

The debt ceiling isn’t some new thing. The modern debt ceiling dates to the Public Debts Act which was passed during the FDR administration by a Congress where Democrats had a supermajority in the Senate and a majority in the House. If Democrats wanted to take that off the table, they could have done so. They controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency and could have done that from 2020-2022. Obviously they didn’t want to deal with the political consequences of being the ones to propose removing the brakes on the car.