Congressmen William Huizenga, a Republican from Michigan, and Scott Peters, a Democrat from California, are urging colleagues to form a commission aimed at confronting the national debt. Whether others join may decide if America faces the pain today or suffers disaster tomorrow.

America’s National Debt has doubled in the last decade, ballooning to almost $34 trillion against an annual gross domestic product of $23.3 trillion. The Debt Clock projects a $41 trillion hole by 2026, with the tide of federal IOUs increasing at a rate of $90,000 per minute.

“The natural progress of things,” President Jefferson wrote, “is for liberty to yield — and government to gain — ground.” An unspoken, bipartisan agreement about borrowing money against the nation’s credit has ensured that Jefferson’s formulation is coming to pass, with economic freedom shrinking as budgets grow. 

“We just can’t wait any longer,” Mr. Peters tells NPR in a joint interview with Mr. Huizenga, citing Congressional Budget Office analysis that Social Security will run out of money in ten years. “The closer we get to that insolvency date, the more certain it is that benefits will be cut and the more expensive it will be to remedy that.” 

It’s wrong to give Americans “this impression that if we do nothing, that’s good,” Mr. Peters says. He describes Social Security as “in the hospital.” Giving it “care” is up to Congress,” he said, which shouldn’t worry “about the election and not so mistrustful of voters that they wouldn’t understand.”

Mr. Peters also notes that interest on the debt now outstrips what America spends on Medicare and programs for children. Buttressing his point, for the first time last month, America started spending more on interest than defense. 

“There are some folks here,” Mr. Huizenga allows to NPR of Congress, “who I lovingly call ‘debt deniers.’ They kind of have this notion of, ‘Yeah, don’t worry about it. We’ll be able to either print our way out of it,’ or, ‘It doesn’t really matter what we borrow.'”

That has been business as usual for decades. Democrats would play deficit hawks when in the minority and Republicans would do the same when they held power. This symbiotic relationship served political ends if not public ones.

This time, however, Mr. Peters is partnering with, in Mr. Huizenga, a Republican. Together they are urging colleagues to join their commission and stop the shell game. The idea was last tried in 2011, when Congress trumpeted a “Super Committee” to address the problem only to disband it without fanfare — or progress — a year later.

In his Congress, Messers. Huizenga and Peters have a powerful ally, Speaker Johnson. In his first speech with the gavel in October, he pledged to create a debt panel “immediately.” It wouldn’t be “an easy task and tough decisions will have to be made,” he said, “but the consequences if we don’t act now are unbearable.”

America last paid off its debt in 1837 under President Van Buren. So Americans tend to regard it with a shrug. The scale of today’s number, though, and the rate of its rise, have never been equaled, rendering it a clear and present danger.

Others in Washington disagree, counting on the old accounting tricks to keep the problem concealed from voters. President Biden often claims to have cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion to paint a rosy picture with all that red ink. Yet, as I wrote for the Sun in August, fact-checkers at CNN and the Washington Post have both debunked this claim.

“Mr. Biden,” I wrote, “has a stubborn habit of conflating the deficit,” shortfalls in each year’s budget, “and the national debt, which is cumulative.” In February, Mr. Biden even said that his $1.7 trillion number “is not the debt this year or last year,” although it was, even if accurate, just that. 

Messers. Huizenga and Peters have taken the first steps to facing an inconvenient fiscal reality. By confronting the “debt deniers” with their commission, they’re reminding them that without action, the natural process of government growth will roll on — until one day soon, citizens have yielded so much ground that their liberty drowns in a sea of red ink.