Gregory Korte, USA TODAY
7/18/2011
Politicians held increasingly accountable for debt ceiling votes, as a result of political ad campaigns targeting the debt issue...
ARTICLE — Debt-limit votes have been called the "burden of the majority" — an unpleasant chore that needed to be done by whichever party happens to be in power.
For former congressman Michael Arcuri, D-N.Y., his vote to raise the national debt limit was more like "the albatross."
Arcuri was one of 233 Democrats who voted last year to increase the debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion.
"I knew I would have to pay the price on Election Day," he said. Indeed, six months later, Arcuri lost to Republican Richard Hanna, following weeks of attack ads citing his debt-limit vote. "Arcuri promised to cut wasteful spending, but voted for $14trillion in debt," said one Hanna ad.
That vote was the 78th time Congress raised the debt ceiling since 1960, usually in routine, party-line votes.
The 79th vote has proved much more difficult. What changed? Divided government with Democrats controlling the Senate and White House and Republicans controlling the House of Representatives, a shift in public opinion on government spending and debt and a crop of 80 freshmen Republicans who ran against incumbents on the debt-limit issue, experts say.
"There seems to be an openness and willingness to take this to the brink in a way I've never seen before," said Linda Kowalcky, who studied the history of debt-limit votes at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "I hate to point fingers at the Tea Party," she said. "They are just evidence of a broader cultural and ideological shift," toward limited government spending.
In past years, party leaders were powerful enough to whip votes for "must-pass" legislation like a debt-limit increase, where failure could mean the government would default on its debt, she says.
When Republicans refused to vote for a debt limit increase in 1979, Democrats who controlled Congress instituted the "Gephardt rule," which avoided a separate debt-limit vote by including it in the budget resolution — ensuring that Democrats would vote for it.
The author of that rule, former House majority leader Dick Gephardt, said that wouldn't work today.
"You have a perfect storm on the debt ceiling," he said. "The deficit has never been this bad. I'll never forget my first debt-ceiling vote was $900 some-odd billion. It was under a trillion. Now it's $14trillion and growing every day. You have a situation where you have a divided Congress, which in and of itself presents a problem," said Gephardt, now a Washington lobbyist with the Gephardt Group. "You're in a world that's a lot more polarized, which makes it more difficult to put together moderate coalitions."
And then there are the ads. Last year, Republican campaigns and their allies spent more than $10million on ads mentioning the debt-limit vote, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group. In total, those ads aired more than 21,000 times.
"Dog catches car, you get elected, and now you have to vote on the same thing," said Evan Tracey, who teaches campaign management at George Washington University and studies political ads. "And the one thing no politician wants to be is a hypocrite."
"Forever, nobody cared about the debt. There's a graveyard of candidates that ran against the national debt, and now all of the sudden it matters," Tracey said.
Arcuri almost voted against the 2010 debt-limit increase, but he was persuaded by a last-minute floor speech by then-majority leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md. Raising the debt limit, Hoyer said, is not a vote for "Republican responsibility or Democratic responsibility, but for American responsibility."
"You don't go to Congress to take easy votes. Sometimes you have to take tough ones," said Arcuri, now a Syracuse lawyer. "I don't have a lot of respect for people who say, 'It needs to be done, but I'm not going to support it.'"
Hanna, who ran against Arcuri twice and beat him the second time, acknowledges that raising the debt limit "will eventually be necessary." But he said the mistake made by previous Congresses was to raise the debt limit without meaningful spending reforms.
"This nation has never defaulted on a nickel and it never should," he said in a statement. "This is a unique opportunity and leverage the moment to achieve historic, long-term deficit reduction."