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The Democratic-majority House of Representatives approved Tuesday to suspend the debt ceiling until December.
The initiative was approved with 219 votes in favor and 206 against, and will now be sent to the White House for President Joe Biden to sign it into law.
Specifically, the initiative, which was already approved by the Senate last week, raises the debt ceiling by $480 billion, an amount that will allow the country’s debt to rise enormously in order to pay for the operation of the State until December 3.
The progressives wanted to suspend the debt ceiling until December 2022 in order not to talk about the issue during the campaign for next November’s legislative elections, in which the party fears losing the majority it has in the two chambers of Congress. Republicans, for their part, have opposed continuing to give a blank check to the Biden Administration.
Even so, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, decided last week to waive a parliamentary mechanism that requires a supermajority to pass legislation, which allowed the Democrats to move forward alone with the temporary suspension of the debt ceiling.
The United States has never had to declare a default on its national debt, but it came close in 2011, when the mere possibility of that happening unleashed chaos in the financial markets and caused Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the country’s credit rating.
