White House and congressional negotiators are currently in the process of striking a deficit reduction deal, as most Republicans in Congress are refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling without deep cuts to public investments and social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare. By doing so, these Republicans are essentially holding the country hostage, threatening the United States with default unless Democrats agree to these cuts.

Yet these Republicans were not always demanding hostages in exchange for allowing the country to pay its own bills. In November of 2004, Congress voted in both the House and Senate to hike the U.S. debt limit by $800 billion, which raised the total ceiling to $8.1 trillion.

A ThinkProgress review of the votes in both the House and Senate finds that a whopping 130 congressional Republicans voted to hike the debt ceiling that November that remain in the U.S. Congress today (either in their same seats or by coming to the Senate). These members of Congress did not demand draconian cuts in public investment that would’ve driven up unemployment and threatened the economy in return.

Of course, there was one other difference between then and today. President George W. Bush was in the White House, and Republicans did not have an incentive to try to politically damage him by holding the debt ceiling hostage. In 2002, during another hike in the nation’s debt limit under Bush, his press secretary Ari Fleischer said it was important to raise the debt ceiling because it was not the time “to engage in activites that could in any way raise questions about the full faith and credit of the United States”:

MR. FLEISCHER: The Senate passed, 68-29, a clean increase in the debt limit. The President praises the Senate’s action. The debt limit is a very important issue. This is not the time to play any — this is not the time to engage in any activities that could in any way raise questions about the full faith and credit of the United States. And the President urges the House to follow the Senate’s action on this matter.

These votes also prove that these Republicans, when faced with the default of their country, are willing to vote to raise the debt ceiling; this indicates that it is perhaps unneccesary to strike any sort of deficit reduction deal at all to win their votes. If Republicans and Democrats want to strike a grand bargain on deficit reduction, they can certainly do that in the context of the budget appropriations process rather than holding the debt limit hostage.

2012 GOP hopeful Mitt Romney, who is basing his presidential campaign largely around his supposed economic bonafides, hasn’t missed an opportunity to bash the Obama administration for failing to stem the foreclosure crisis. “We’ve got housing prices continuing to decline, and we have foreclosures at record levels. This president has failed,” Romney said during a primary debate in March.

Romney even made a campaign stop in a Nevada neighborhood blighted by foreclosure. However, Romney’s concern for the housing crisis seems to end where his campaign coffers begin. As the Boston Globe noted today, T. Martin Fiorentino Jr., one of Romney’s top fundraiser, is a registered lobbyist who lobbied on anti-predatory lending legislation on behalf of a company called Lender Processive Services, a notorious foreclosure mill:

As he has built his fund-raising machine, [Romney] has relied heavily on a man who has lobbied Congress on mortgage reform and antipredatory lending legislation that contained strict rules aimed at preventing another subprime mortgage collapse.

T. Martin Fiorentino Jr., who raised $102,900 for Romney, lobbied on the legislation on behalf of Lender Processing Services, a so-called “foreclosure mill’’ that was reprimanded in April by the government for “unsound practices related to residential mortgage loan serving and foreclosure processing.’’

If anything, the Globe downplays the problematic nature of Lender Processive Services. As Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism explained, the company was at the forefront of the robo-signing scandal, during which banks approved thousands of foreclosures without verifying basic information or engaging in due process:

Lender Processing Services has played a singularly destructive role in the mortgage servicing industry. The firm not only offered document fabrication services through DocX, a company it acquired and was forced to shut down after the Department of Justice started sniffing about, but is being revealed to be involved in more abuses as far as borrower records and legal process are concerned. [...]

This abuses matter due to the role that LPS has come to play. It is the biggest player in default services, meaning it acts as the de facto selector and supervisor of foreclosure mills via its system, LPS Desktop, which manages and oversees the work of local law firms on behalf of its bank servicer clients. It also provides the servicing platform for more than half of the servicing industry. And as our two latest examples show, the company clearly places its profits over integrity of records and due process.

The company was so keen to speed foreclosures on troubled borrowers that it hired temps to forge the signatures of its robo-signers. Considering that the Associated Press reported today that robo-signing is still very much alive and well, Romney should have to explain how his purported concern for homeowners squares with the actions of one of his top fundraisers.

Congressional Republicans continue to doubt President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s urgings that Treasury will exhaust its ability to keep the country beneath its statutory debt limit on Aug. 2. While Treasury was able to find ways to push back earlier deadlines, the Aug. 2 date is the “drop dead date,” according to Geithner and other Treasury officials.

So far, however, the questioning has come mainly from talk radio hosts and backbench Republicans who lack any real influence in the party. Their attacks, that deadline is Aug. 2 so Obama can celebrate Ramadan or have celebrities perceive him as a hero at his birthday party, have been easily dismissed. But Monday, the first attack came from a member of House leadership when Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, claimed on Southern California Public Radio that Aug. 2 was an “artificial deadline” Obama was using to “extort a deal” out of Congress:

“We should not be having a discussion with a artificial deadline of August 2nd, set by the President so the President can extort a deal through his reelection period. That’s not right, it’s not what the American people expect us to do.”

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) piled on Tuesday, saying, “The president needs a crisis to blame us for the economy that he’s made worse.”

Issa and DeMint are, of course, wrong that the date was determined artificially. The extended deadline was determined by projected government revenues and expenditures since the government officially hit its credit limit in May. Among the House GOP’s leadership, Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) agree that a deal must be done by August 2.

In April, Issa called the raising of the debt ceiling an “inevitability” that “we must do” to “authorize the government to borrow money rather than simply default on its loans,” hinting that failing to do so would prevent senior citizens from receiving Social Security and Medicare payments. Now, with that exact scenario set to unfold in two weeks, Issa would rather join the fringes of his party by playing politics with the American economy than take the necessary steps to avoid crisis.

Yesterday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) unveiled his dead-on-arrival plan to reduce the nation’s debt by $9 trillion over the next 10 years. Coburn, who stormed out of debt talks a few weeks ago in a temper tantrum, hailed his own 614-page report as taking on both sides’ sacred cows. “Nobody is going to like what we’ve done because everybody gets a pinch,” he said at a press conference. Coburn proposes major cuts to veteran’s benefits, student aid, and Medicare. He also includes an assortment of off-the-wall ideas, like completely eliminating the $1 dollar bill.

That’s right — the curiously titled “Back in Black” plan proposes completely eliminating the $1 bill and replacing it with $1 coins. Coburn estimates this will save taxpayers $2.04 billion over 10 years:

The Treasury Department should phase out use of the $1 bill and replace it with the $1 coin. Paper-based currencies wear out faster than coins, and so cost taxpayers more in the long run. According to GAO, starting in the 1980s, “Over the last 47 years, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Spain, and the UK, among others, have replaced lower-denomination notes with coins.” GAO also estimates that over a 30-year period, the average annual savings would be approximately $184 million.

Coburn cites numbers by the well-respected GAO, but misrepresents the savings to be had. The GAO estimates savings of $184 million a year could come over a 30-year period — Coburn makes it seem like Americans would see over $2 billion in savings in the next 10 years.

However, eliminating the dollar bill is a proposal endorsed by respected voices on the left and right. As GAO notes, there is one problem with the plan: When given a choice between dollar coins and dollar bills, Americans always choose bills. Americans would much rather carry light bills around than heavy coins. The GAO has made similar proposals four times during the past two decades, and nothing has ever come of it. Although now that a new zeal to cut the debt and deficit has descended on DC, the time may be right for a change.

Former President Bill Clinton told the National Memo’s Joe Conason yesterday that, were he still president, he would invoke the 14th Amendment “without hesitation” to raise the debt ceiling if Congress fails to do so by the Aug. 2 deadline:

Former President Bill Clinton says that he would invoke the so-called constitutional option to raise the nation’s debt ceiling “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me” in order to prevent a default, should Congress and the President fail to achieve agreement before the August 2 deadline.

Sharply criticizing Congressional Republicans in an exclusive Monday evening interview with The National Memo, Clinton said, “I think the Constitution is clear and I think this idea that the Congress gets to vote twice on whether to pay for [expenditures] it has appropriated is crazy.”

Lifting the debt ceiling “is necessary to pay for appropriations already made,” he added, “so you can’t say, ‘Well, we won the last election and we didn’t vote for some of that stuff, so we’re going to throw the whole country’s credit into arrears.”

The 14th Amendment reads, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law… shall not be questioned,” which some scholars have interpreted as giving the president the authority to pay off all outstanding obligations of the United States, regardless of the statutory debt limit imposed by Congress. Prof. Garrett Epps, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, wrote in the Atlantic that “it’s not hard to argue that the Constitution places both payments on the debt and payments owed to groups like Social Security recipients — pensioners, that is — above the vagaries of Congressional politics.”

Republican economist Bruce Bartlett wrote that the president has “constitutional authority to take extraordinary measures to protect the public credit and prevent a debt default even if it means disregarding the debt limit, which is statutory law subordinate to the Constitution.” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has hinted that the debt ceiling violates the 14th Amendment, and several senators have been looking into the validity of the administration disregarding the statutory debt limit.

As ThinkProgress’ Ian Milhiser wrote, “The 14th Amendment’s Public Debt Clause has never been tested in court, so it is anyone’s guess how it would apply if President Obama decided to save the country from economic ruin by continuing to spend the money Congress lawfully appropriated after we hit the debt ceiling. But it is not even clear that courts would take the case if someone sued to force the United States to default on its debts.” According to Clinton, Treasury officials during his administration looked into invoking the 14th Amendment in case the debt ceiling wasn’t raised.