U.S. House Republicans are taking a novel approach to the thorny problem of the federal borrowing limit: opting to temporarily ignore it.
Some of Georgia’s staunch conservative members are on board, signaling that the vote scheduled for Wednesday is likely to succeed in delaying hitting the debt ceiling until May 18.
The government would be allowed to borrow beyond the $16.4 trillion cap — now set to be breached sometime between mid-February and mid-March — as the bill would just suspend the debt ceiling law without setting a new amount. The White House said Tuesday that President Barack Obama would sign such a bill, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated he was open to it as well.
The point from House Republicans’ point of view is to avoid a budget conflict over the debt ceiling, negotiating instead around scheduled across-the-board budget cuts and the expiration of government funding for the year. Those deadlines arrive in March.
Brinkmanship on those policies could hurt the economy, but economists consider a technical default on the federal debt far more damaging. Standard & Poor’s downgraded the nation’s debt after the 2011 debate over the issue, and business leaders have been pressuring Congress to lift the cap.
The House is packed with Republicans who vowed never to raise the debt ceiling without corresponding spending cuts. This bit of fiscal gymnastics can be spun as not breaking that pledge, because the debt ceiling law is suspended for a few months while the cap remains.
“The debt ceiling is just something that we need to put off until after we get the cut,” said Coweta County Republican U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland. “… It’s kind of a chess game in a way, and we think we’re moving our pieces in the right direction.”
In addition, the bill sticks a finger in the eye of the Senate by stating members of Congress will not get paid after April 15 if they do not pass a budget. Senate Democrats have declined to pass a budget framework in the past three years, leaving fiscal policy to negotiated spending caps and appropriations bills. House-passed budgets authored by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., have gone nowhere in the upper chamber.
“You absolutely force the Senate after four years to come up with a budget resolution,” said U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey, a Marietta Republican who also supports the GOP bill. “I think it’s great thing. That’s the only way you can get back to fiscal sanity. So I’m real pleased with that.”
Not everyone is pleased.
Athens Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Broun said he likely would only vote to raise the debt ceiling if such a measure included a Constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget.
“We need to have some spending controls here in Washington, and this bill doesn’t put any spending controls,” Broun said. “In fact it takes away any cap on the ability of the federal govenrment to borrow money, and I just totally disagree with that.”
The debt ceiling is essentially a second bite at the apple for Congress, which already passed the laws and appropriated the money to run up the debt. The House bill would not allow the Treasury Department to spend past the cap on any payments that are not due before May 19.
DeKalb County Democratic U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson thinks the debt ceiling is silly policy, and he has co-sponsored a bill to eliminate the World War I-era law altogether. He plans to vote against the bill Wednesday because he is against including any conditions for raising the ceiling, and the fact that Republicans attached a date rather than a dollar amount underscores that view.
“That shows in and of itself how meaningless the actual vote is,” Johnson said. “I mean, the debt ceiling should not even be subject to a vote.”
U.S. Rep. Tom Price of Roswell was one of the conservative Republicans who worked with House leaders to construct a bill that would bring the right wing along. He said conservatives won assurances that the House would propose to balance the budget within 10 years, and that leadership would hold firm in offsetting any changes in scheduled Pentagon cuts with corresponding budget trims elsewhere.
“The spending curve is coming down,” Price said. “And the commitment to get us to balance means we’ll have to address the reforms in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”
The early days of the 113th Congess have displayed the difficulties House Speaker John Boehner has in holding his caucus together, so getting Price publicly on board along with three other current and former chairs of the conservative Republican Study Committee was a key step. Also on Tuesday, the influential group Club For Growth — which often works to unseat Republicans it deems insufficiently conservative — said it would not oppose the debt ceiling measure.
House Democrats do not intend to do Boehner any favors. Atlanta U.S. Rep. David Scott indicated that he and his fellow Democrats would wait until Republicans vote their approval before releasing their support.
“It’s not what we want,” said Scott, who prefers a long-term resolution. “But on the other side, it does admit, it gives some admittance on the Republican side that they understand that they’re weakening their position and their resolve on this.”
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