CONGRESS SENDS OBAMA BILL TO END SHUTDOWN
David Nakamura, Paul Kane and Lori Montgomery,
Sixteen days after a federal government shutdown began and one day before the United States would have exhausted its ability to borrow money, Congress approved a bill to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling until Feb. 7. President Obama has promised to sign the legislation immediately, meaning hundreds of thousands of federal workers could be back at work Thursday.
By a vote of 81 to 18, the Senate sent the 35-page bill to the House of Representatives, where it was approved just a little over two hours later.
“We fought the good fight; we just didn’t win,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in an interview with conservative radio host Bill Cunningham.
At the White House, Obama hailed the Senate’s deal. “Once this agreement arrives on my desk I will sign it immediately and we will begin reopening the government immediately, and we can begin to lift this cloud of uncertainty and unease from our businesses and the and the American people.”
Obama said he hopes to move forward on other domestic priorities, including immigration reform and the farm bill. “We could get all these things done if everybody comes together in a spirit of ‘how can we move this country forward’ and put the last three weeks behind us.”
Boehner and other GOP leaders acknowledged defeat hours after Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced terms of their deal on the Senate floor, drawing support from the White House. The Senate plan avoids any major changes to the Affordable Care Act, a major victory for Democrats and a repudiation to Republicans who for weeks tried to use the threat of a shutdown and potential default to force changes in the law.
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Boehner, along with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), told Republicans at a closed-door afternoon meeting that they all planned to vote for the deal, said Aaron Schock (R-Ill.). The speaker said Republicans nevertheless would continue in other ways to try to force Obama to slow or repeal portions of his health-care law.
Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), one of the more conservative voices in the House GOP caucus, told CNN on Wednesday afternoon: “We lost. That’s it. You’re absolutely right. The folks who said we were going to lose turned out to be correct. I can’t argue that.”
In addition to lifting the $16.7 trillion debt limit , the emerging measure would fund the government through Jan. 15, delaying the next threat of a shutdown until after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. It would set up a conference committee to hammer out broader budget issues, such as whether to replace deep cuts to agency budgets known as the sequester with other savings.
But the bill’s timeline sets up another potentially bitter showdown over spending cuts and entitlement programs that will unfold in the halls of Congress over the next four months.
In a small Democratic concession on the Affordable Care Act, Republicans got additional safeguards to ensure that people who receive subsidies to buy health insurance are, in fact, eligible.
“Republicans remain determined to repeal this terrible law,” McConnell said in announcing the agreement alongside Reid. “But for today – for today – the relief we hope for is to reopen the government, avoid default and protect the historic cuts we achieved under the Budget Control Act.
“This is far less than many of us had hoped for, frankly. But it’s far better than what some had sought.”
At the White House, press secretary Jay Carney endorsed the Senate compromise: “The president applauds Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell for working together to forge a compromise and encourage Congress to act swiftly to end the shutdown and protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”
As part of the agreement, Reid said, Senate and House leaders would appoint representatives to “a budget conference committee that will set our country on a long-term path to fiscal sustainability.”
He said the panel, to be chaired by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), head of the Senate Budget Committee, and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, would be tasked with producing a “negotiated budget resolution” in December that would help prevent the frequent budget crises that have occurred in recent years.
Committee members “must have open minds,” Reid said, and “be willing to consider every option, no matter how painful to their own political ideas and even to their own political parties.”
In negotiating the compromise legislation, Democrats dropped their demand to delay a new tax on existing health-insurance plans, a change intended to benefit organized labor. And Republicans backed off their push to deny the Treasury Department flexibility to manage the nation’s books after Feb. 7, an aborted attempt to ensure that the short-term extension of the debt limit doesn’t somehow drag on into the spring.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said the looming debt deadline — after a bitter, weeks-long standoff — meant that Republicans had little or no leverage.
“This package is a joke compared to what we could have gotten if we had a more reasonable approach,” Graham said. “For the party, this is a moment of self-evaluation, we are going to assess how we got here. If we continue down this path, we are really going to hurt the Republican Party long term.”
The financial world has been carefully watching the chaos on Capitol Hill, and U.S. markets rose Wednesday amid reports of the deal. The Dow Jones industrial average, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Nasdaq each were up more than 1 percent.
Markets had closed down Tuesday, when the inability of House lawmakers to forge their own bill left Washington lurching toward the borrowing deadline with no clear plan for avoiding a government default. Fitch Ratings, the third-largest credit-rating agency, took a step toward a potential downgrade of the government’s AAA rating. Fitch warned that “political brinksmanship and reduced financing flexibility” were elevating the risk of default.
The Senate deal came in the final hours before the government would have exhausted its borrowing power Thursday, leaving Treasury Secretary Jack Lew with just $30 billion in cash and a fluctuating flow of incoming tax revenue to pay the nation’s bills. While Lew was unlikely to begin missing payments immediately if no deal had been reached, independent analysts say he would have run short of funds no later than Nov. 1.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who staged a 21-hour filibuster earlier in the process, criticized the Senate deal and chided Senate Republicans for not fighting harder to support the House GOP in its fight to win concessions on the president’s health care law.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also denounced the deal, saying in a statement that it “postpones any significant action on pro-growth and spending reforms and does nothing to provide working class Americans even one shred of relief from ObamaCare’s harmful effects.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat and chief vote counter, predicted that the package would easily pass the Senate with support from both parties. In the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has pledged the support of all 200 Democrats, meaning Boehner would have to supply at least 17 votes.
Democrats say there are enough Republicans who will vote with them to pass the bill, and conservative Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) acknowledged that it appeared likely that the House would approve the Senate deal using mostly Democratic votes.
“It seems to be where it’s headed,” Jordan said Wednesday, adding that he and other conservatives will remain strenuously opposed.
[Related: Who controls the House GOP? No one.]
William Branigin, Debbi Wilgoren, Rosalind S. Helderman and Jackie Kucinich contributed to this report.