Minor miracle: Conservatives got a win out of a debt-ceiling showdown

As the various factions on Capitol Hill pore over the proposed debt ceiling deal, I cannot help but wonder at how much the conservative wing of the Republican Party has been able to accomplish in this process.

I know that sentiment isn’t shared by every conservative, and certainly not by every member of the Freedom Caucus. And I respect that. They are elected and I am not; they have constituents to worry about, and I stopped worrying about that long ago. They have to get elected again, whereas I just sit back, observe and comment.

But that detachment — viewing this deal as an informed citizen, and not someone with a voting card — does give me a different perspective. And from where I am sitting, we are witnessing a miracle — a minor miracle, perhaps, but a miracle just the same.

That’s because there will actually be some spending reductions as part of this deal. Not large reductions, by any measure. But some. There are some policy reforms as well — not a lot, but some. There is even some COVID money clawed back — not as much as some Republicans would have liked, but some.

It is hard to describe how countercultural that list truly is. After all, Washington really hates spending reductions. It loathes conservative policy changes. And it almost never, ever, claws back money it has already spent. To put that in perspective, there is still unspent money from Hurricane Katrina. Please allow that to sink in.

So, I will take “some” minor victories. “Some,” after all, is a lot better than what conservatives got the last couple of times the debt ceiling was raised. That includes increases, by the way, that took place with a Republican in the White House. And it even includes one increase when Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the White House. That year, the deal that President Trump negotiated raised the debt ceiling and had precisely zero spending reductions. It was so awful that 90 House Republicans voted against it.

The fiscally conservative wing of the GOP lost some of its focus while Donald Trump was in the White House. That might be understandable: It’s sort of hard to be a fiscally conservative Republican when the head of your party is attacking you for wanting to spend less.

Trump even dissed fiscal conservatives as he cut a debt-ceiling deal with Nancy Pelosi, tweeting, “Republicans, sorry, but I’ve been hearing about Repeal & Replace for 7 years, didn’t happen!”

That fiasco cost them, for a time, the moral high ground when it comes to an issue on which Republicans should dominate.

If the current debt ceiling battle marks a return to the GOP’s fiscally conservative roots, it will be a welcome development. Indeed, later is better than never.

Back in 2017, left-leaning media outlets inside the Beltway were beside themselves, trumpeting headlines as to “How Democrats Rolled Trump on the Debt Ceiling.” And Democrats on Capitol Hill were trying hard not to gloat, lest the deal fall apart.

Republicans didn’t roll anyone here, and there certainly isn’t much to gloat about. But fiscal conservatives got something, which is more than anyone expected. That might not be enough for some Republicans to vote for the bill. But for us ordinary, fiscally conservative-minded citizens, it is a move in the right direction for a change.

Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and acting White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.