Column | Is D.C. finally admitting that the debt limit serves only as a cudgel?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : Then Trump became president.
46% : The era of legislators -- almost all of them Republicans -- centering their politics on constraining federal spending came to an end when the Republican Party handed over its leadership to the guy from the lavish, gold-plated Manhattan condominium.
40% : But it's in keeping with his having effectively sidelined big-picture concerns about government spending among his party's legislators and its base.
31% : Capitol Hill is currently embroiled in a fight over government funding, though, during a period when the lame-duck Biden will soon hand over power to (functionally lame-duck) Trump.
25% : The second Bush term mirrored Trump's and Biden's despite the debt limit.
24% : Speaking to NBC News on Thursday, Trump disparaged the debt limit as not "mean[ing] anything," advocating for its elimination.
20% : It's well-established by now that Donald Trump is not a deficit hawk.
13% : Some Republicans have been critical of the increase in the federal debt during Biden's administration, often failing to offer similar critiques of the increase seen under Trump.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.