Debt crisis averted — but spring fight still ahead

DAVID ESPO

AP Spe­cial Correspondent

WASHINGTON — Retreat­ing with a pur­pose, Repub­li­cans sped leg­is­la­tion through the House on Wednes­day to avert the immi­nent threat of a gov­ern­ment default but point­ing the way to a spring­time bud­get strug­gle with Pres­i­dent Barack Obama over Medicare, farm sub­si­dies and other ben­e­fit programs.

The cur­rent leg­is­la­tion, which cleared the House on a bipar­ti­san vote of 285–144, would per­mit Trea­sury bor­row­ing to exceed the limit of $16.4 tril­lion through May 18. As it passed, Speaker John Boehner pledged that Repub­li­cans would quickly draft a bud­get that would wipe out deficits in a decade, and he chal­lenged Democ­rats to do the same.

The Democratic-controlled Sen­ate is expected to approve the debt bill as early as Fri­day or per­haps next week. The White House wel­comed the leg­is­la­tion rather than face the threat of a first-ever default at the dawn of the president’s sec­ond term in the White House, and spokesman Jay Car­ney point­edly noted a “fun­da­men­tal change” in strat­egy by the GOP.

House Repub­li­cans cast the bill as a way to force the Sen­ate to draft a bud­get for the first time in four years, not­ing that if either house fails to do so, its mem­bers’ pay would be with­held. They called the bill “no bud­get, no pay,’” a slo­gan if not a state­ment of fact, since law­mak­ers would be enti­tled to col­lect their entire salaries at the end of the Con­gress with or with­out a bud­get in place.

With polls show­ing their pub­lic sup­port erod­ing, the Repub­li­cans jet­ti­soned, for now at least, an ear­lier insis­tence that they would allow no addi­tional bor­row­ing unless Obama and the Democ­rats agreed to dollar-for-dollar fed­eral spend­ing cuts in exchange.

The aver­age Amer­i­can fam­ily “can’t buy every­thing they want every day; they have to make tough choices. It’s time to make Con­gress make the same choices,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., under­scor­ing the new Repub­li­can ral­ly­ing cry.

Rep. Paul Ryan, the Wis­con­sin law­maker who will be respon­si­ble for draft­ing the bud­get for Repub­li­cans, said Con­gress has “a moral oblig­a­tion” to pre­vent a debt cri­sis that he said will hit hard­est at seniors and other who depend on gov­ern­ment the most.

As chair­man of the House Bud­get Com­mit­tee, Ryan will take the lead role in craft­ing a blue­print expected to rely heav­ily on sav­ings from ben­e­fit pro­grams. The bud­get he wrote last year before being picked as the party’s vice pres­i­den­tial can­di­date was to take two decades to achieve balance.

Ryan’s 10-year-budget task will be erased in part by higher tax rev­enues result­ing from the Jan. 1 expi­ra­tion of a two-year pay­roll tax cut, and in part from an antic­i­pated $600 bil­lion gen­er­ated by rais­ing rates on upper incomes. But given the sheer size of annual deficits in the $1 tril­lion range, it will be impos­si­ble to meet his goal with­out tak­ing large sav­ings from ben­e­fit pro­grams such as Medicare and Med­ic­aid, farm and stu­dent loan sub­si­dies, the fed­eral retire­ment pro­gram and more.

House Democ­rats made no attempt to defend the Senate’s fail­ure to draft a bud­get over the past three years, instead say­ing a mere four-month exten­sion in the debt limit would not give busi­ness and the finan­cial mar­kets the cer­tainty that is nec­es­sary for the econ­omy to grow more quickly.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Mary­land, his party’s senior Bud­get Com­mit­tee mem­ber, said the good news was, “Repub­li­cans have finally rec­og­nized the gov­ern­ment must pay its bills. … The bad news is they only want to do it for three months.”

Beyond the rhetoric lay a polit­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion on the part of Boehner and other House Repub­li­cans that they could not afford to set up an imme­di­ate con­fronta­tion with Obama. At a closed-door retreat last week, the rank and file was pre­sented with polling that showed their sup­port erod­ing since the elec­tion into the mid-to-high 20s, and indi­cat­ing that increas­ingly the pub­lic believes they oppose Obama out of polit­i­cal motives rather than on police grounds.

The same sur­vey shows sig­nif­i­cant sup­port for spend­ing cuts, although back­ing wanes when it comes to reduc­tions in indi­vid­ual pro­grams that are popular.

Sev­eral offi­cials said the lead­er­ship and Ryan had solid­i­fied rank-and-file Repub­li­cans behind a shift in strat­egy by empha­siz­ing a com­mit­ment to a bud­get that would elim­i­nate deficits in a decade, and the sen­ti­ment was expressed Wednes­day on the House floor.

“This is why I ran for office. This is why I came to Wash­ing­ton, D.C.,” said Rep. Tom Reed of New York, first elected in 2010 as part of a tea party-flavored wave that gave Repub­li­cans their majority.

Another Repub­li­can, Rep. Michael Fitz­patrick of Penn­syl­va­nia, answered Demo­c­ra­tic taunts: “This is not a gim­mick,” he said.

Posted by AP News on Jan 24 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.