The scare passed. The drama is over. The United States Senate on Thursday night definitively averted the danger that the country would enter into suspension of payments next week by exceeding its debt ceiling, established at 31.4 trillion dollars.
By 63 votes in favor and 36 against, the Upper House of Congress seconded the House of Representatives in the decision to suspend said limit for two years in exchange for applying a part of the budget cuts demanded by the leaders of the Republican Party in Congress. .
The vote ends weeks of political tension in the wake of Republicans’ decision to take advantage of their slim majority in the House, as well as tight Democratic control of the Senate, to take the debt ceiling hostage with which to negotiate their proposals for cuts and thus limit the political capacity of President Joe Biden.
The Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, had warned of the imminent exhaustion, around June 5, of the ceiling that the administration had to request loans and issue bonds with which to meet its payment obligations. Without the mandatory congressional agreement to raise or suspend that cap, the nation would have entered a dire default and perhaps triggered a global “financial catastrophe,” Yellen warned and then Biden repeated.
In view of the danger, averted on 78 previous occasions and to which only in 2011 did the country get so close as to take the rating agency Standard
As was to be expected, and as in fact Biden himself announced when making the “principle of agreement” public, the bilateral compromise provoked rejection and criticism on both sides of Congress; by the most ultra-conservatives, considering the cuts insufficient, and by the Democrats further to the left, judging them excessive. The discontent was reflected in fact in the votes in a notorious way, although obviously in the minority.
Now debt peace is guaranteed for two years, that is, until after the presidential elections of November 2024.
McCarthy and Biden, who in the next few hours will sign the text of the agreement to turn it into law, can sleep easier. Until the next drama.
