As Mike Johnson tries to get fiscal hawks onboard with his reconciliation bill, the speaker is now planning on including a once-unthinkable line item: a debt ceiling hike.
Plenty of Republicans have resisted voting for debt limit raises in the past, meaning Democrats have had to pick up the GOP’s slack. The result is that, typically, debt ceiling bills are bipartisan. The problem is that the whole point of the reconciliation bill is that it isn’t bipartisan.
At the moment, Johnson’s decision to include a debt ceiling hike — or to “probably” include it, as he told reporters on Friday — is delighting conservatives.