WASHINGTON — Neither the House nor the Senate has a clear path forward for must-pass legislation to allow the government to continue to borrow to pay its bills, putting lawmakers and financial markets alike on edge less than a week before the deadline for heading off a first-ever U.S. default.
The pressure is on House Speaker John Boehner, who's being forced to rewrite his debt and budget plan after nonpartisan congressional scorekeepers said it wouldn't reap the savings he's promised.
The Ohio Republican also needs to shore up his standing with tea party-backed conservatives demanding deeper spending cuts to accompany an almost $1 trillion increase in the government's borrowing cap.
In a national, prime-time address Monday, the president declared that Boehner's plan "would force us to once again face the threat of default just six months from now. In other words, it doesn't solve the problem."
But debt ceiling increases are by definition temporary. Since 1993, when the debt ceiling stood at $4.37 trillion, Congress raised the limits 13 times, in amounts that lasted from three months to almost five years. The debt ceiling was raised 18 times during President Ronald Reagan's two terms, including three times during his 1984 re-election run, for an average length of about five months. House Republicans point out that is a shorter period than the six-month debt ceiling increase their plan would provide.
The problem for Obama is that Boehner's plan ties a second debt ceiling increase to a broad scrubbing of entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, with a goal of reducing long-term deficits by at least $1.8 trillion. White House officials fear that under such a plan, the debt ceiling would once again be pushed to a near-crisis point in January as lawmakers undertake what so far has been a Sisyphean task to cut the costs of the nation's biggest benefit programs.
White House officials say that effort would be further complicated because it would be colored by election-year politics.
Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell both have accused Obama of being more worried about his own re-election than the fiscal health of the country. "With all due respect to the president, we have more important things to worry about than getting through the next election," McConnell said.
Obama, however, has said he would be willing to seek increases in the debt ceiling during an election year if they somehow would be guaranteed to pass, as they were in a proposal by McConnell.
"That way folks in Congress can vote against it, but at least it gets done," Obama said Friday. "I'm willing to take the responsibility. That's my job. So if they want to give me the responsibility to do it, I'm happy to do it."
For House Republicans, the two-step process was not always the preferred method either.
On June 13, Cantor asserted, "It's my desire to have one debt ceiling vote."
A week later, on June 21, he said: "I don't see how multiple votes on a debt ceiling increase can help get us to where we want to go. We want big reforms, we want big spending cuts and big changes to how this town works. And to me, it is a case of having to make some tough decisions. I am not so sure that if we can't make the tough decisions now, why we would be making those tough decisions later."
With six days left before the government exhausts its borrowing authority, Republican officials say they no longer have the luxury of planning a single debt ceiling increase to accomplish the deficit reductions they have in mind.
Those chances faded Friday when Boehner ended negotiations with the White House for a large package of $4 trillion in deficit reductions over 10 years in exchange for a $2.4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. Boehner said he walked out of the talks because Obama had insisted on $400 billion more in tax revenue than the $800 billion that Boehner was willing to concede.
But Republicans believe the only way Democrats and the president will seriously consider structural changes to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security is if the debt ceiling is on the line. Boehner's plan as outlined Tuesday would increase the debt ceiling by $900 billion and seek cuts in day-to-day spending that are greater than that. It then would require a joint committee of Congress to identify deficit reduction measures totaling at least $1.8 trillion. Congress would have to approve those cuts before granting a second debt ceiling increase of $1.6 trillion.
"At this late hour, any plan that's going to have significant deficit reduction is going to have to be a two-step plan," Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said. "There's just not time to write all the reforms needed.
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