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Senate Republicans are raising grave doubts about House Republicans’ plan to raise the debt ceiling as part of a massive tax cuts and border spending bill, a dynamic that could lead to a protracted negotiation with Democrats over avoiding a default.
With roughly two or three months before the US could breach the debt ceiling, the House is trying to raise it by $4 trillion as part of a party-line tax cut bill. However, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has repeatedly told his members he doesn’t believe it can win the 50 Republican votes needed to clear the chamber, according to multiple sources familiar with party meetings.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., warned that tying the debt ceiling to tax cuts “might just sabotage the whole bill.” And Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., recounted telling GOP leaders that “I’ll vote for the tax cuts and to make them permanent, I don’t support raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.”
“There’s a lot of angst generally about using reconciliation for debt ceiling for a variety of reasons. I think that’s gonna be hard to do,” said another Republican senator, granted anonymity to speak freely. “You gotta rely on Republican votes and Republican votes alone. And there is so much bound up in that that I don’t see reconciliation as a likely vehicle for raising the debt ceiling.”
As Republicans try to wrap up a messy campaign to simply fund the government past Friday, they are now preparing to confront an even more consequential deadline. And it all comes as stock markets are down, economic uncertainty is up and everyone is watching President Donald Trump’s tariff regime. Most lawmakers think the debt ceiling will need to be raised sometime around May or June.
Markets pay even closer attention to the debt ceiling than government funding deadlines; getting too close to a breach can harm the country’s credit rating. Trump sought to avoid this whole fight last December when he asked for Congress to end the debt ceiling altogether before he became president, a request that came too late.
Now the two chambers are in a standoff, stuck between two tough choices: Negotiate with Democrats and potentially offer them concessions on federal spending — or try to go it alone and make a whole bunch of Republicans who have never voted for a debt ceiling increase walk the plank, while potentially tying that uncertain vote to the meat of Trump’s agenda.
Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump already convinced House Republicans to support a budget setting up a $4 trillion debt ceiling increase. Actually enacting it across the Capitol will prove much more difficult.
“That’s certainly what the President wants. Now, you know, we’re dealing with the Senate,” said Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo. “All things are on the table right now because we’re obviously having to deal with what they can pass and, more importantly, what we can pass.”
Some GOP senators and aides say the budget reconciliation option could be a useful backup plan if talks with Democrats aren’t going anywhere. Notably, though, doing it through the complex party-line process requires Congress to raise the debt ceiling to a specific number, instead of suspending it for a period of months or years. That makes conservatives even more skeptical.
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Some Republicans, like Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., want to get rid of the debt ceiling altogether to avoid this exercise every few years. Some progressive Democrats would be OK with that, too.
But Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who routinely votes to advance debt ceiling increases past a filibuster, disagrees. “I don’t want to do away with the debt ceiling,” she said.
There are plenty of creative ideas about how to deal with the debt ceiling, which some lawmakers see as a crucial leverage point and others see as an anachronistic headache. In 2021, Democrats and Republicans slipped in a one-time filibuster exemption to allow the debt ceiling to increase. In 2023, House Republicans capped some spending as a condition of raising the limit.
A staunch fiscal conservative, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Semafor he could get behind a debt ceiling lift as part of a budget reconciliation package. But he warned that it would need to contain more substantial cuts than the $1.5 trillion over 10 years the House’s budget currently calls for.
“What President Trump needs to do is he needs to get serious about spending. The House has to get serious about spending,” Johnson said. “A lot of us who have never voted for increasing the debt ceiling are on the record saying we will, if we have a sufficient spending reduction.”
The View From democrats
Democrats are similarly doubtful that House Republicans will be able to do everything they want on taxes, the border and spending cuts while simultaneously raising the debt ceiling on a short turnaround. Asked if he anticipated a bipartisan negotiation this year, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said: “I think there’s a good chance.”
“The more you make their cuts specific, the harder it’s going to be. Dealing with SALT, cuts to Medicaid, there’s just a lot of mines that they could easily step on — and debt ceiling is one of those,” Himes said.
Burgess and Eleanor’s view
We read a lot of the same coverage you do, and government shutdown deadlines are always treated as major fire drills. Yet Congress tips over that cliff every few years, and though there’s often some economic fallout, a debt ceiling crisis is plainly worse.
That’s why a lot of the senators and House members we’ve been talking to the last few months routinely point to the debt ceiling as the central challenge for lawmakers during Trump’s second term. As Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., put it in February to one of us: “You look back a year from now — if I’m wrong, I’ll certainly admit it — but I think the debt ceiling, so long as we can’t address it in reconciliation, is going to be our toughest issue.”
There’s not a ton to be gained by raising the debt ceiling, but failure to do so could cripple the economy — and Trump’s agenda. This is the big fight, and it’s already playing out across the Republican-controlled Congress.
Room for Disagreement
The support for a stopgap spending bill — something conservatives usually hate — among House Republicans is making some lawmakers optimistic about the prospects of dealing with the debt ceiling on the GOP side.
“A lot of it is going to be trust in the Trump administration’s willingness and ability to go and curb spending,” said Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich. “It’s the exact debate that’s happening right now: People who have never voted for a CR, saying, ‘Well, I’m willing to do so because of … what the president’s done.’”
House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, is arguing to Senate leaders that marrying the House budget’s proposed cuts with a debt ceiling increase is what got the whole thing to pass the chamber. It’s a reminder that the House’s narrow margins have to be a consideration for the Senate, as well.
“People were willing to raise the debt limit on account of the fiscal reforms,” Arrington said. “That’s why I would encourage them to take the framework as it is; don’t screw up the balance of nature in the universe over here on account of making any material changes to that.”
Notable
- Kennedy is a key go-between on the debt ceiling between the White House and Congress, per Politico.
- The Congressional Budget Office will have a new x-date — the drop dead moment the debt ceiling needs to be raised — later this month.