> People arguing for raising the debt limit without a fight are completely missing the point. The whole point of the law is to create a point of leverage for measures to cut spending. Negotiations for future spending cuts is exactly what Congress envisioned when they created the debt limit. It’s a system that forces Congress to pump the brakes on spending.

A source for this would be nice. From what I can tell it was created to make it easier to issue debt instead of having to vote on each specific package. Instead it's all lumped into 1 pile. Furthermore it's quite silly as a concept. Congress already voted to spend the money, they are just arguing on if they should pay for what they already agreed to. It's a stupid concept only used to score political points/favors.

> If Democrats wanted to take that off the table, they could have done so. They controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency and could have done that from 2020-2022

I'm not sure how you can say that with a straight face. They technically controlled both houses but passing anything in the senate would have required 10 Republicans to join in with them.

> Obviously they didn’t want to deal with the political consequences of being the ones to propose removing the brakes on the car.

I don't see any basis for this comment at all. Not only would it not be possible without Republican support but using your analogy it's not about removing the brakes from the car but rather using the brakes to not go off the cliff (defaulting) because of speed they already built up (passing spending bills). If you want to "slow down the car" then pass less spending, don't have a silly "debt ceiling" that you act surprised about.