Georgia’s Republican U.S. senators both opposed a budget deal to raise the debt ceiling in the wee hours of Friday, combining with the state’s House Republicans to form a united front.
While U.S. Sens. Johnny Isakson and David Perdue both voted no on the deal to raise the debt ceiling into 2017 and set higher budget caps for the next two years on military and domestic spending, their rhetoric was noticeably different.
Perdue made his opposition well known with a sharply worded statement on Wednesday that implicitly hit Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for negotiating the accord with departing House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama.
The pact avoids a default with just days to spare and solves long-running bipartisan complaints about the “sequester” spending levels, but it offsets two years of extra spending with 10 years of promised savings from entitlement programs and other areas.
Perdue called it a “bad backroom deal” that goes back on the Republican-passed budget he helped craft this year.
“Our long-term plan was traded for short-term gimmicks, trust fund raids and even more spending,” Perdue said. “This deal isn’t compromise; it’s surrender.”
Isakson was more torn. In a phone interview Thursday night, a couple of hours before the vote, he said he would oppose the deal because, among other reasons, the debt increase was indeterminate and because cuts to a crop insurance program could hurt Georgia farmers.
But Isakson was willing to vote yes on a procedural vote to avoid a filibuster and move along the process.
“It may be a must-pass issue in terms of getting it done, but it doesn’t mean you do it at any cost,” Isakson said. “And that’s why I’m not going to support the end product because we could have done better, in my judgment, and I would like to have done better, and this is not the way I would have gone about it. But we ought to have an up-or-down vote on it one way or another.”
When it came time to vote on cloture at 1 a.m., Isakson was in the no column. Isakson spokeswoman Amanda Maddox said Friday that the senator did, indeed, not want to slow down the process. But once he saw his vote was not needed — there were 63 yes votes — he voted no to register his disapproval of the deal.
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