Republicans in the US Senate offered US President Joe Biden and his party a deal to suspend the debt ceiling and prevent the country from defaulting on its national debt on October 18.
The leader of the Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell, said in a statement that he is willing to suspend the debt ceiling until December and announced that his senators will not block a vote to that end if the Democrats decide to submit it to the Upper House for consideration.
Democrats have yet to say whether they will accept that offer and, right now, they are gathered in a Senate room debating what to do.
Until now, Democrats had tried to suspend the debt ceiling until December 2022 with the idea that, in this way, they would avoid talking about this issue during the campaign for the legislative elections in November of next year.
Although McConnell has offered to suspend the debt ceiling until December, he remains opposed to passing any long-term measures.
Republicans can block Democrats’ initiatives in the Senate because 60 votes are needed to pass any law, and that chamber is currently split in half with 50 seats for the Conservatives and 50 for the Democrats.
Democrats, however, have the majority because they have a runoff vote from Vice President Kamala Harris, who is serving as Speaker of the Upper House.
McConnell’s offer came just before the US Senate held a first vote on the bill passed last week by the Democratic-majority lower house to suspend the debt ceiling until December of 2022.
The Republicans had already warned that they would vote en bloc to overthrow that initiative.
This debt ceiling situation, which drives the United States into the abyss every few years, occurs because the government spends much more money than it gets through federal taxes.
Unlike other countries, in the US, the government can only issue debt up to the limit set by Congress, which has the power to raise that ceiling as it sees fit.
The United States has never had to resort to defaulting on its sovereign debt, although it was close in 2011 with Barack Obama in the White House.
Then huge chaos broke out in the financial markets, prompting Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the country’s solvency score.
.