Senate Republicans sow disinformation after $480bn US debt ceiling deal

Top Republicans in the Senate are advancing a campaign of disinformation over the debt ceiling as they seek to distort the reasons for needing to raise the nation’s borrowing cap, after they dropped their blockade on averting a US debt default in a bipartisan manner.

The Senate on Thursday passed a bill to allow the debt ceiling to be raised by $480bn through early December, which the treasury department estimates will be enough to allow the government to temporarily avert an unprecedented default on $28tn of debt obligations.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer announced the morning before its passage that he had reached a deal with the Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to clear the way for the vote on a short-term extension with GOP support.

The movement came after McConnell made a tactical retreat to back down from weeks of refusal to allow Democrats to raise the debt ceiling by any measure other than through a complicated procedure known as reconciliation that would have required a party-line vote.

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz said on the floor: “Unfortunately, Republicans blinked.”

And some Republicans railed against what they saw as an unnecessarily triumphalist victory speech by Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer after the deal, while West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin put his head in his hands during the address and later called it “inappropriate”.