Businessweek - "How to Solve the Debt-Ceiling Crisis Forever" - Hint: The Gephardt (D) Rule
When trying to push the idea that both sides are to blame, the media repeatedly fails to mention that in January 2011, one of the first thing House Republicans did was to repeal the Gephardt rule, which required the debt ceiling to be raised along with the passage of the budget, which sort of makes sense. Why pass a budget that you can't pay for? Of course, that could complicate Republican efforts to pay for tax cuts to the rich, so there is that.
Anyways, the fact of the matter is that for all the talk about a CR, Congress has not passed a budget. They are now fixated on a CR, which is simply a band aid. The parties could end this drama, but extending the debt ceiling for a short period of time long enough to actually pass a budget, get serious about passing a budget, then as part of the budget, raise the debt ceiling per the Gephardt rule. Indeed, the reinstatement of the Gephardt rule should be a Democratic demand to keep Republicans from insisting on unpaid for budget busting tax cuts for the rich.
Unfortunately, this makes way too much sense for modern House Republicans, which means that there is a slim chance that this gets implemented.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-07/how-to-solve-the-debt-ceiling-crisis-forever
Most of the history of past shutdowns and near-defaults dredged up to lend perspective to the current crisis focuses on how common these events were in the past. But for more than a decade, in the 1980s and early ’90s, the default threat was basically eliminated. The trick was doing away with the bizarre two-step process by which the U.S. government budgets and then spends money.
Quick civics refresher: First, Congress passes a budget resolution that determines how much will be spent. Then it raises the debt limit to allow for that spending. Why two steps? There is no good reason. It invites the widespread misperception, currently being fanned by Republicans (but also once fanned by one Senator Barack Obama), that the critical spending decisions come in Step Two, not Step One, and that refusing to raise the debt ceiling addresses them. It does not. But it does cause crises like the one we’re in now.
Back in 1979, the Democratic House Speaker, Tip O’Neill, handed the unhappy job of lining up votes for a debt-ceiling raise to Representative Richard Gephardt, then a young Democratic congressman from Missouri. Gephardt hated this, and, realizing he’d probably get stuck with it again, consulted the parliamentarian about whether the two votes could be combined. The parliamentarian said they could. Thereafter, whenever the House passed a budget resolution, the debt ceiling was “deemed” raised.
The “Gephardt Rule,” as it became known, lasted until 1995, when the new House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, fresh from the Republican triumph of the 1994 midterms, recognized the same thing that Tea Party Republicans recognize today: The threat of default could be used to extort Democratic concessions. Gingrich abolished the Gephardt Rule, and within the year the government had shut down.
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