House Republican leaders Monday unveiled a plan to reverse a recently passed cut to military pensions as the price for increasing the government’s borrowing cap, but it received a rocky reception from skeptical conservatives.
GOP leaders briefed rank-and-file GOP lawmakers at a meeting Monday evening in the Capitol in hopes of passing it on Wednesday before departing Washington for a week-long vacation. It was unclear whether the vote would still go forward.
“Right now we’ve got a debt ceiling bill that increases spending, which is diametrically 180 degrees opposite of what we were battling over just two years ago — where the question was how much in spending cuts we were going to get,” said Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala.
The GOP bill would extend the Treasury Department’s borrowing authority for at least another year, repeal the curb passed in December on pension inflation adjustments for military retirees under the age of 62, and extend automatic cuts to Medicare and other programs to 2024, another year longer than currently scheduled.
It is also not clear that the plan will fly with House Democrats. Their votes would be needed to help pass the measure since some Republicans refuse to support an increase in the debt ceiling under any circumstances. A spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Democrats will continue to insist that any debt limit legislation omit add-ons, even bipartisan proposals like repealing military pension cuts.
But Democratic-majority Senate demonstrated the appeal of the repealing the cuts with 94-0 procedural vote Monday, and House GOP leaders seem confident they would win Democratic votes.
If Monday’s plan falls through, however, GOP leaders may have little choice but to yield to Democratic demands for a debt ceiling measure that’s “clean” of GOP add-ons, which would be a bitter defeat for a party that has sought to use must-pass debt ceiling measures as leverage to force spending cuts on Democrats.
The cuts to cost-of-living pension increases for military retirees under the age of 62 were part of December’s budget agreement, backed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Repealing them would cost $7 billion over the coming decade, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday.
The reduction has sparked an uproar among advocates for veterans, and lawmakers in both parties want to repeal it. The cost of canceling the cut would be borne by extending for an additional year a 2 percentage-point cut to Medicare reimbursements for doctors and hospitals, as well as cuts to a handful of other benefit programs.
Time is running out for lawmakers to act to lift the debt limit. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told lawmakers last week that Treasury will exhaust by Feb. 27 its ability to employ accounting maneuvers to borrow to pay its bills.
Lew told congressional leaders on Monday that he had begun tapping two large government worker retirement funds to clear room under the debt limit. Previous Treasury secretaries have also employed this bookkeeping maneuver. Once Congress approves a new debt ceiling, the Treasury makes the funds whole by replacing the withdrawn funds and lost interest earnings.
Raising the limit is needed so the government, which ran a $680 billion deficit last year, can borrow enough to pay all its bills, including Social Security benefits, interest payments on the accumulated debt and government salaries.
After last year’s 16-day shutdown and accompanying debt battle, Republicans controlling the House are no longer interested in a big fight with Obama over raising the borrowing cap, preferring to keep the election-year focus on President Barack Obama’s health care law.
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