(Bloomberg News) Weeks before Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine will face a vote on raising the U.S. debt limit, she's ready with a pre-emptive defense of her record on the subject.
The issue has come up 47 times since she arrived in Congress in 1979, Snowe recites, without missing a beat, when asked about her checkered history of voting for and against such measures-22 times as a stand-alone, or "clean" vote, and 25 times attached to some other legislation.
"I voted seven times against debt-ceiling increase under a Democratic president, just in the last 18 years, and five times against it during a Republican administration-just to give you a window," Snowe, who is facing re-election next year, said on May 12. "I've looked at it. I went back."
Snowe isn't alone in Washington. With a vote looming sometime in the next few months on raising the nation's $14.3 trillion debt limit, lawmakers in both parties are poring over their voting records and parsing their arguments, puzzling over what position to take on a vote that is never pleasant.
When it comes to the debt limit, virtually every member of the U.S. Congress is a flip-flopper. That includes President Barack Obama, who as a senator from Illinois in 2006 voted against raising the limit, a move he now calls "a mistake."
"Nobody likes to be tagged as having increased the debt limit," Obama said last month.
Republicans routinely oppose the move when a Democrat is in the White House, and Democrats regularly say "no" when a Republican is president.
Divided Government
Yet in an era of divided government-with Democrats controlling the White House and the Senate while Republicans dominate the House-the two parties must find a way to compromise. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said May 13 his department is already using "extraordinary measures" to avoid hitting the debt limit. Geithner has said he will run out of options for avoiding a U.S. default on its obligations by about Aug. 2.
That gives Congress several weeks to negotiate a deficit-reduction deal to pave the way for a vote to raise the limit. Vice President Joe Biden is holding private talks with senior Republicans and Democrats.
"The way it had always worked in the past was that the incumbent party had the obligation to renew the debt ceiling," Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat, said at the Bloomberg Breakfast in Washington on May 11. "And the question now is, you have divided government, so both parties have an obligation."