“We are going to pursue strategies that will obligate the Senate to finally join the House in confronting the government’s spending problem,” Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said in a statement today at the end of the party’s private policy retreat at a resort near Williamsburg, Virginia.
Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia said in a statement that their plan is to block pay for members of Congress if the House or Senate doesn’t adopt a budget by the end of the proposed debt-limit increase. A leadership aide said Republicans are dropping their insistence that a short-term extension be accompanied by a dollar-for-dollar spending cut.
The Treasury Department has said the U.S. will exceed its $16.4 trillion borrowing authority sometime from mid-February to early March. Congress faces two other fiscal deadlines in the next 90 days, and House Republicans plan to use those debates -- rather than the one over the debt limit -- to try to force spending cuts.
Financing for government agencies is scheduled to lapse March 27, and lawmakers must pass new spending or face a government shutdown. Also in March, Congress will confront the $110 billion in automatic spending cuts, half from defense, that were postponed in the Jan. 1 tax deal.
Long-Term Increase
Republicans will continue to seek spending reductions as part of a long-term increase in the debt limit, said the Republican leadership aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
President Barack Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, said today in a statement, “We are encouraged that there are signs that congressional Republicans may back off their insistence on holding our economy hostage to extract drastic cuts” in spending.
“Congress must pay its bills and pass a clean debt limit increase without further delay,” Carney said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s spokesman, Adam Jentleson, said in a statement that the House must pass a “clean” debt-limit increase. He didn’t address Cantor’s statement about requiring members of Congress to forfeit their pay if the chambers don’t adopt a budget.
Spending ‘Framework’
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in a statement that the lack of a Senate-passed budget in the last several years was a “shameful record that needs to end this year.”
Both chambers of Congress should lay out a “framework” of future government spending, Representative Kevin McCarthy said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s “Capitol Gains” program airing Jan. 20.
“You can’t get out of this without passing a budget,” McCarthy of California said.
Political divisions in Congress pose limits to the ability of Republicans to achieve their long-term goals of deep cuts in spending, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin told reporters at the retreat yesterday.
Attaching a requirement that the Senate pass a budget to a short-term debt-limit extension would require Senate Democrats to spell out their spending plans.
Ryan said Republicans want “a two-way discussion between Democrats and Republicans and out of that hopefully some progress being made on getting this deficit and debt under control.”
Senate Budget
The last time the Democratic-led Senate adopted a budget was in April 2009. The Senate and House are supposed to pass budget resolutions early each year to set a spending framework, though there is no enforcement mechanism. Without a budget resolution, appropriations bills allocate money for the federal government.
Leaders said the tactic of short-term debt-limit increases was used in the 1980s during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as a prelude to broader agreements on spending cuts.
“No one is talking about default, no one wants to default,” South Carolina Republican Mick Mulvaney, who voted against the 2011 debt-ceiling deal, said in an interview today with Bloomberg Television. There is a “lot of support growing” among the rank and file for a short-term debt limit, he said.
The comments by Mulvaney and Ryan reflected the new political realities following President Barack Obama’s re- election that are spurring House Republicans to reassess their goals.
‘Good Deal’
“If you get a little bit of reform for a little bit of extension” of borrowing authority, that “sounds like a pretty good deal,” Mulvaney told reporters. “If you can figure out a way to get little types of reform, little fixes for small extensions, I don’t find that objectionable.”
Bloomberg
