I know this will shock you but it looks as though the Republicans are hypocrites:
The White House on Thursday signaled little appetite for Senate Republicans’ early insistence that Congress should couple an increase in the country’s debt ceiling with corresponding spending cuts, hoping to ward off a major political showdown entering the summer.
A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President Biden “fully expects that Congress will meet its obligations as it did on a bipartisan basis three times during the Trump Administration and amend the debt limit law as needed.”
The early warning comes a day after Senate Republicans gathered to adopt their conference’s guiding rules for this session of Congress. Unanimously, the GOP members agreed to a non-binding yet symbolic statement that they would not raise the debt ceiling unless lawmakers also cut slashed by a similar amount or made other structural changes to government programs.
Senate Republicans agreed to stake the position at the request of Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), who regularly has joined other Republicans in blasting Biden and his Democratic allies for seeking major spending increases, including as part of $2 trillion infrastructure reform plan.
[…]
Under Trump, Republican lawmakers did not demand spending cuts as they raised the debt ceiling several times, even as the former president shelled out massive sums to fund his priorities, including the military. But the GOP historically has sought to use the debt as leverage in political fights against Democrats, at one point putting the country at risk of default under former President Barack Obama in order to secure a decade of caps on domestic spending.
I hope nobody in the Biden administration thought the fact that they gave Trump everything he wanted meant they would be too embarrassed to pull these shenanigans. They are, as we know, shameless. They will have no problem simply saying “well, that was different” and moving right along. And their voters are fine with it as well.
This is going to be a huge battle. I hope everyone’s prepared for it.