Sen. Ernst to Newsmax: GOP Will ‘Push Back’ Dems’ Debt Plan

Iowa GOP Sen. Joni Ernst told Newsmax Wednesday that Republicans in Congress will definitely “push back” on any Democratic efforts to work around raising the debt limit with alternatives like invoking the 14th Amendment to effectively raise the limit by executive order.

“We absolutely will be pushing back on this,” Ernst said during “The Chris Salcedo Show” on Wednesday. “[House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy has brought forward a solution. [Republicans] passed a bill in the House that addresses the debt ceiling and reduces spending, which is absolutely necessary.”

The “debt ceiling” is a cap on how much debt the federal government can incur, which must be raised periodically for Congress to borrow money to pay its obligations, and it must be done by June 1, NPR reported earlier this month.

“It used to be that every time you did a Treasury auction where you borrowed, Congress would pass a new law just for that one auction,” Jason Furman, a top economic adviser to former President Barack Obama and an economics professor at Harvard, told NPR.

“In 1917, the United States needed to borrow a lot of money for World War I,” he said. “So, in order to simplify that process and make it easier, Congress shifted to a new system where they said, ‘You can borrow up to this amount of money and then come back to us and we’ll raise it.'”

According to the report, the limit has been raised 78 times since 1960.

Recent negotiations have proved fruitless so far as a June 1 deadline approaches for the government to run out of money.

With the current impasse between Republicans and Democrats on the issue, some have suggested President Joe Biden could invoke the 14th Amendment, which states, “The validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” However, that solution would certainly bring legal challenges, the Washington Post reported.

“I think it makes it very difficult for the Democrats to negotiate through different pieces of legislation and spending in the future,” Ernst said. “I would proceed with extreme caution on this.”

Ernst said it is important for the Republicans to resist any attempt to circumvent Congress in raising the limit to keep spending under control.

“People have a voice in this, which is why Republicans are pushing back, because more spending by this Democratic administration is absolutely untenable,” she said. “The people here in Iowa say they are very concerned about what Democrats are doing without controlling spending.”

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