Key GOP lawmaker notes DeSantis voted to raise debt ceiling

Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) noted that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) voted to increase the debt ceiling while serving in the House, when asked in an interview on NewsNation on Monday to respond to criticism of the newly announced bipartisan deal from DeSantis and former President Trump.

“It’s said that you campaign in poetry, and you govern in prose. Man alive, are those comments proof of that,” Johnson said. “Ron DeSantis, he has voted for debt ceiling increases in the past when he’s in the House. I know those guys. They should have the flexibility to change their minds, but they should be honest with the voters that when they’ve been here in the past, they’ve raised the debt ceiling.” 

Johnson, a key ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) who was involved in the debt limit negotiations, has defended the agreement reached with President Biden, which would suspend the debt ceiling for two years while adding new spending caps during that time. The deal in principle was announced over the weekend and still needs to go before the House and the Senate in the coming days.

“Prior to this deal … our country was careening towards bankruptcy. And after this deal, our country will still be careening towards bankruptcy,” DeSantis said on “Fox & Friends.”

“To say you can do 4 trillion [dollars] of increases in the next year-and-a-half, I mean, that’s a massive amount of spending. I think that we’ve gotten ourselves on a trajectory here — really since March of 2020, with some of the COVID spending, and totally reset the budget, and they’re sticking with that. And I think that that’s just going to be totally inadequate to get us in a better spot,” added the governor, who officially entered the 2024 GOP presidential race Wednesday. 

Johnson said in the interview on NewsNation that Trump, too, signed measures into law to raise the debt ceiling and did not extract the same kind of concessions that McCarthy was able to secure.  

“Here’s the history: Donald Trump, when he was president, had the debt limit increased three times. He didn’t secure any major concessions as a part of that. By the way, I voted against raising the debt ceiling every time, because I didn’t think it did enough,” Johnson said.