House raises debt limit for a year with no strings attached

Not voting: Rep. David Scott, D-Atlanta; Rep. John Lewis, D-Atlanta

The U.S. House moved Tuesday to raise the federal borrowing limit until March 2015 with no strings attached, meeting the demands of President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats while spurning conservatives.

The vote was rushed to beat an impending snowstorm and was the result of a morning change of plans by House Speaker John Boehner, who could not round up Republican votes for any plan to attach minor policy concessions to an increase in the debt limit, so he opted for a “clean” version.

The Treasury Department says the nation will reach its statutory borrowing limit near the end of the month, with the publicly held debt now more than $17 trillion.

All of Georgia’s Republicans voted against the bill in a 221-201 tally carried mostly by Democrats and House GOP leaders.

“I’m glad Republicans finally faced reality and stopped playing games with the debt-ceiling vote,” said Rep. Hank Johnson, a DeKalb County Democrat who has introduced a bill to get rid of the debt ceiling altogether. “This is just a routine legislative exercise.”

Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah, one of three House Republicans running for Georgia’s open U.S. Senate seat, said the Democratic-controlled Senate is to blame for not getting together on reducing the deficit.

“Debt ceilings always are a difficult decision,” Kingston said. “And I think that we put some proposals together and we have not had any success with the Senate getting them to sit down and work with us on things. We need to shred the credit card and make some of the tough decisions.”

The bill could pass the Senate later this week.

Tuesday’s vote was the latest in a string of losses for archconservative members of the House and outside pressure groups, who had driven the House agenda until last fall’s partial government shutdown that proved to be a political black eye for Republicans. Since then, a bipartisan two-year budget deal, yearly spending measure and farm bill have become law over their objections.

The seeds of this debt-ceiling drama — or lack thereof — lay in the August 2011 crisis that resulted in “sequestration,” $2 trillion in across-the-board program cuts over a decade. Passed just before a technical default on U.S. government obligations, the brinkmanship rattled financial markets, and Obama declared he would refuse future negotiations on raising the cap.

The debt ceiling should be raised without preconditions, Obama and other Democrats say, because it simply pays bills Congress already has racked up. Yet raising the debt ceiling has at times provoked debate about the country’s budgetary path and provided a moment to strike fiscal deals, and Republicans see it as one of few opportunities to force a real negotiation.

Last year, House Republicans attached a provision to a debt-ceiling increase requiring Senate Democrats to pass a budget to earn their paychecks. The most recent debt-ceiling increase, in October, included tiny tweaks to the new health care law and an end to the government shutdown.

In the shutdown debate, House conservatives forced Boehner into a challenge of the health care law known as Obamacare, and it failed. The outcome emboldened Democrats to refuse any concessions on cutting future spending.

“What in the world has happened between August of 2011, when the president and the Senate were partners with us to both raise the debt ceiling and try to solve the problem, to where folks today say: ‘Hey, clean debt ceiling. There’s no problem, nothing to see here’?” said Republican Rep. Rob Woodall of Lawrenceville. “Drives me crazy. Not our fault, but I don’t know where the American people are on that.”

Woodall spoke as he emerged from a testy Monday night meeting where Boehner proposed tying changes to military pensions to the debt-ceiling increase. Last year’s budget agreement had saved $6 billion by trimming cost-of-living increases to pensions for early military retirees, drawing an outcry from many in the military community.

GOP leaders quickly realized they did not have the votes to pull it off, with Democrats vowing only to support a clean bill, and Boehner told his caucus Tuesday morning that he was changing course. The House easily passed the military pension bill separately Tuesday.

“When you don’t have 218 votes, you have nothing,” Boehner told reporters at a news conference. “We’ve seen that before, and we’ve seen it again.”

He left singing “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”

Democrats viewed the episode as a change in House Republicans’ approach to fiscal confrontation.

“They recognize the futility of their previous efforts,” Johnson said of Republicans. “I don’t think the Republicans want to go there again. They took a beating when it happened before.”