How Congress Wrecked a Smart Debt-Ceiling Fix

The most infuriating part of the fiscal-cliff debate was that the whole construct was phony, a threat devised by Congress to force itself to reduce the deficit. The coming debt-ceiling crisis is much worse and even more infuriating. It too is a creation of Congress—but one that came into being when members, for partisan purposes, deliberately broke an easy way of raising the debt limit that had worked for years.

Through a quirk of history that dates back to World War I, the U.S. has a two-step budget process. First, Congress passes a budget resolution that determines how much money will be spent. Then it raises the debt ceiling to accommodate that spending. This creates an opportunity for grandstanding that politicians in both parties (including a former senator named Barack Obama) have found irresistible: They can vote for whatever programs they like in the budget resolution, then turn around and pose as heroic stewards of the public purse by refusing to raise the debt ceiling to pay for them, with most voters none the wiser. This ritual has frustrated political leaders for generations. Fifty years ago, Douglas Dillon, President Kennedy’s Treasury Secretary, griped: “[L]et no one labor under the delusion that the debt ceiling is either a sane or an effective instrument for the control of federal expenditures.”