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On the national debt
Democrat
RESTRAINT
Dick Durbin's answer on the debt was a sentence long: don't pass any of the administration's spending proposals 1. That is not a plan to balance a budget and it does not pretend to be. It is the only lever a minority holds, and it is being pulled.
Worth saying plainly, because the other side of this page is about people who would not: the honest Democratic position here is opposition to this administration's spending, not fiscal hawkery. Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, in the same reporting, says both parties talk about the debt and then do not act on it 1. He is right, and a party that admits that is doing something the other one is not.
Sources
Republican
BLANK CHECK
The debt is $39.68 trillion. Federal spending this year is $7.4 trillion against $5.6 trillion of revenue, and the deficit is heading for two trillion in a single year 1.
None of that is the story. The story is who is saying it. Rand Paul, a Republican senator, puts eight trillion of new debt on Trump's first term and says this term will add at least eight trillion more 1. And the Republicans who actually voted against deficits — Thomas Massie, Chip Roy — lost their primaries 1. A party does not lose its fiscal hawks by accident. It replaces them, and then it stops having to argue about the check.