Debt Ceiling Voting

Here is an interesting article by Gerald Seib in today's WSJ. This article highlights how partisan debt ceiling voting has been over the past ten to twenty years. Important excerpts include:

• Iowa has two Senators, one a Republican (Charles Grassley), the other a Democrat (Tom Harkin).
  Each has voted seven times since 2002 on a bill to raise the nation's debt ceiling. Look back at those votes, and an interesting pattern emerges: Every time a Republican president has needed the debt ceiling raised to keep government functioning, Sen. Grassley, the Republican, has voted to raise it, while the Democrat, Sen. Harkin, has voted against it. But when a Democratic president has asked for an increase, their votes reverse: Sen. Harkin has voted in favor, and Sen. Grassley has voted against it.
  That, in a nutshell, shows why it's so absurd that Washington is headed toward a showdown over debt and the deficit tied to the question of whether to raise the national debt ceiling. Few exercises produce as much cynical and overtly partisan behavior by elected officials as do votes on the debt ceiling.
• Donald Marron, an economist at the Tax Policy Center, has compiled figures showing just how partisan debt-ceiling votes are. In the House of Representatives, there have been three up-or-down votes in the last decade in which the vote was 100% partisan—that is, it passed solely with the votes of the president's party.
  In the Senate, the pattern is similar. When Mr. Obama needed a debt-ceiling increase in 2009 and 2010, he got one Republican vote the first time (from the now-retired Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio) and no Republican votes the second time. Similarly, when Mr. Bush needed debt-ceiling increases in 2003, 2004 and 2006, he got three, two and zero Democratic votes, respectively.

One would hope that our representatives would learn from this previous partisanship and address this issue in a more serious and thought out manner.....I'm not holding my breath though.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703856704576284850332076820.html?KEYWORDS=seib