Earlier this week, the U.S. Congress voted to raise the national debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion.
Senate Democrats approved the measure on December 14, 2021, with House Democrats quickly following their footsteps.
Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) were against the final vote to enable the US Treasury Department to issue more debt.
Cornyn, however, voted with 13 other Republicans in support of a cloture motion for the bill that eventually allowed Democrats to increase the debt ceiling with a simple majority vote, according to Daniel Friend of The Texan.
Democrats possess fifty Senate seats on top of the tie-breaking vote in Vice President Kamala Harris.
In Cruz’s case, he voted against the bill to raise the debt ceiling and the procedural motion to realize its passage.
“Our national debt is $28.9 trillion, and today Senate Democrats voted to increase the debt limit by $2.5 trillion, the single largest increase ever enacted by Congress,” Cruz declared in a press release.
“At the same time, President Biden and the Democrats are hell-bent on ramming through their radical Build Back Broke agenda to spend trillions of dollars more on socialist priorities,” Cruz said, “which will drive inflation even higher and make it more expensive for hard working families to put food on their table, gas up their cars, and heat their homes. Americans could not have asked for a worse gift for Christmas.”
The passage of the debt ceiling hike was primarily on a partisan basis.
In the U.S. House, all Democrats voted for raising the debt ceiling. On the other hand, all Republicans, with the sole exception of Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), voted against the bill.
The $2.5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling came on the heels of a short-term boost of $480 billion approved in October, which Friend observed came “with the help of Cornyn.”
The recent debt ceiling increase came after December 15, when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen declared that the $480 billion short-term increase would be sufficient to fund the government.
“[T]here are scenarios in which the Treasury would be left with insufficient remaining resources to continue to finance the operations of the U.S. government beyond this date,” Yellen wrote in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.