The McConnell rule on debt ceiling

Yesterday’s NY Times had an editorial titled “How to disarm the debt-ceiling threat for good” which said, in part:

See Opinion | How to Disarm the Debt-Ceiling Threat for Good - The New York Times for the full editorial.

Can anyone explain what is the status of this “rule”. An agreement between the parties cannot overrule a statute. If it was actually a law, then why didn’t Obama employ it? If not an actual law, isn’t it meaningless? Why hadn’t it been mentioned before? I read the editorial several times and I could not figure out what it was really saying.

It wasn’t used to end the shutdown/debt ceiling problem, it was enacted as part of the vote to end the shutdown. No effect on this past debt ceiling fight, but may well hamstring future fights.

People got really confused about this in another thread. The law simply says Congress is giving the President permission to increase the debt ceiling to a certain amount, and that he has until a certain date to do so. It’s basically a time-dated permission slip.

The President does not have a general power to do this, he only has power on this issue that legislation gives him, and the legislation gave him temporary power to do this.

The NY Times Editorial Board’s proposal in that article is a political nonstarter by the way.

It was only enacted temporarily, and ends at the same time the latest deal to extend the ceiling ends, so it won’t really effect anything in the future either.

It was originally added basically as a political gimick, the GOP thinking they could use it to pass a bunch of laws ending the debt ceiling extension and then forcing the Dems to block it, so “Senator so and so voted to raise more debt x number of times” could be used in campaign ads. Given how negatively the public reacted to the latest set of debt-ceiling games, though, I doubt it will see use even for that purpose.