Mark Levin Explains Why the Debt Ceiling Negotiations Didn't Matter: The System Is Broken

On Life, Liberty, and Levin on Sunday, Mark Levin used his opening monologue to reveal some sobering truths about the coverage of the debt ceiling negotiations by the legacy media. He cited reports by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the trustees of the Social Security system that show that federal spending has gone completely insane. Levin calls it frightening. Notably, Levin points out that all the reports he cited came from the Executive Branch, controlled by the Biden administration. He openly questions whether anyone in Congress bothered to read the reports, never mind the upper echelons of the Biden administration, and concludes our federal government has become irrevocably broken.

It’s hard to escape that conclusion, as hard to stomach as that truth may be.

In the second half of his monologue, Levin then offers the proposition that the Convention of States under Article V of the Constitution offers the only hope of fixing our broken system. Before we get to his full-throated advocacy for the solution to our broken system that the Founders included in the Constitution, let’s review how deep the problem runs.

Buckle up.

Corporate media coverage has pitted the fight between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his narrow Republican majority and the Biden administration and the overblown risk of the federal government defaulting on its obligations. Not a single major news organization has explained the reason the debt ceiling exists in the first place, choosing instead to make this the next major crisis. Levin rightly points out that a failure to pass a debt ceiling increase would cause about ten percent of federal spending to temporarily pause, as most of the spending occurs by statute and can’t be stopped.

Meanwhile, media coverage has completely ignored the real problem. The United States government has never spent at these profligate levels when it wasn’t engaged in an active war, and certainly not for this long. The GAO just released its report, The Nation’s Fiscal Health, on May 23. Levin says this report was handed out to every member of Congress by the executive branch.

“What do they [the GAO] say?” Levin asks. “Why do I care? Why do you care?” He reads from the report:

The federal government faces an uncertain long-term fiscal future. Long-term projections from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Department of Treasury, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and the GAO all show that the balance of current revenue and program spending policies result in debt growing faster than the economy. This is unsustainable over the long term.

This comes as little surprise to those who have followed federal government overreach since the Tea Party days and before. What’s remarkable is that these reports emanating from the Biden administration call into question the policies that have led to such insane spending levels. “The government never writes reports like this,” Levin says, “The government never speaks like this.”

The report goes on to say that financing our public debt has grown more expensive as interest rates have risen, leading to record deficits in fiscal year 2022. This is the inevitable result of the Federal Reserve raising rates in an attempt to get inflation under control, putting federal policymakers in a no-win situation. Either raise rates and watch the debt explode to levels we can’t pay back, or watch inflation get out of control and destroy our economy.

Flashback from 2012, or, I think we’ve been here before: Was It Over When the Germans Bombed the Fiscal Cliff?

All of this would have been completely avoidable if Congress and the executive branch had done their jobs. Instead, we have nearly two decades of Fed policy and insane domestic spending that nobody seems to want to address. After all, it wouldn’t be politically expedient.

So we find ourselves in quite a predicament, one in which the CBO says, “High and rising federal debt as a share of the economy increases the risk of a fiscal crisis.”

“What they’re trying to say,” Levin concludes, “is the economy could COLLAPSE.” The CBO emphasized this point, reporting that the public debt has GROWN during three of the past four economic expansions when it normally shrinks naturally in proportion to the size of our nation’s GDP.

This represents a mere summary of the monologue. The entire thing will turn your hair white.

So what can we do when seemingly nobody in Washington at any level of the government has the intestinal fortitude to address the problem in any meaningful way?

Levin takes this opportunity to pivot, citing the late Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Coburn sadly lost his battle with cancer in 2020, but while he served in the Senate, he became famous for his attempts to fight back against corruption in the federal institutions. Levin says:

He [Coburn] said I’ve been here a long time, I’ve been fighting this battle on the budget … he said this is hopeless. The system is broken. Rather than trashing Kevin McCarthy, or trashing any of these people, maybe he could have gotten a better deal, maybe not, but it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter. Nothing they discussed all last week addresses Social Security or Medicare. And their trajectory keeps going up.

Levin then read Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which offers two means by which to offer amendments that could be used to rein in an out-of-control federal government. Article V reads:

Article V

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate. [emphasis added]

Levin has long supported the idea of an Article V convention and wrote a book about it: The Liberty Amendments. The second mode of amending the constitution was included at the suggestion of George Mason, whom Levin describes as one of the underappreciated Founders. “Two days before the Constitutional Convention comes to an end on September 17,” Levin says, “George Mason… stands up and says we cannot leave it to Congress to fix Congress if Congress becomes oppressive.” This, Levin says, is why they added the language to allow the people, via their representatives in the state legislatures, to rein in an out-of-control Congress.

Of course, the Founders never could have envisioned a Congress that relinquishes virtually all of its powers and virtually all of its responsibilities to unelected bureaucracies with little-to-no oversight. The Deep State has flown as predictably as the morning sunrise from a series of congressional actions that shift governmental operation and oversight away from itself.

Levin implores, “Why does any of this matter, ladies and gentlemen?”

Because our Constitution can save us. We have all these conservatives in the House and the Senate that are upset at what’s taking place. Not one of them gets up and talks about Article V. Why is that? They know, I know, you know. If you didn’t know before, now you know. We are on a horrendous path, and no bill passed by Congress is going to fix it. I’m all for taking as many conservative principles and applying them as possible. But we have a structural problem. It didn’t happen yesterday. It’s happened over a hundred years. Our Constitution gives us a way out. And if the state legislatures, the state representatives, the state senators would understand their power… they actually have more power than the Congress and the president put together… there are now twenty state legislatures that have adopted a resolution for a convention. NOT a constitutional convention. A convention of states. A meeting of state delegates. You still need 34 states to ask for it. You still need 38 states to ratify it. So it’s not easy. But I have to ask myself, where are my fellow conservatives in the House and in the Senate? Where are the conservatives running for president? If you want to save the country, at least fiscally, this is what you have to do!

Levin then gives the rest of his time in the monologue to discussing his proposals for reining in federal spending that he first conceived in The Liberty Amendments. There are lots of great ideas here to fundamentally fix our broken system.

The full video is a must-watch for anyone who believes our system must be fixed before it’s too late.