WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — House Republicans plan to vote Wednesday on a three month extension of U.S. borrowing authority in an effort to force the Democratic-led Senate to adopt a budget plan.
“We are going to pursue strategies that will obligate the Senate to finally join the House in confronting the government’s spending problem,” Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said in a statement Friday at the end of the party’s private policy retreat at a resort near Williamsburg.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia said in a statement that their plan is to block pay for members of Congress if the House or Senate doesn’t adopt a budget by the end of the proposed debt-limit increase. A leadership aide said Republicans are dropping their insistence that a short-term extension be accompanied by a dollar for-dollar spending cut.
The Treasury Department has said the U.S. will exceed its $16.4 trillion borrowing authority sometime from mid-February to early March. Congress faces two other fiscal deadlines in the next 90 days, and House Republicans plan to use those debates - rather than the one over the debt limit - to try to force spending cuts.
Financing for government agencies is to lapse March 27, and lawmakers must pass new spending or face a government shutdown. Also in March, Congress will confront the $110 billion in automatic spending cuts, half from defense, that were postponed in the Jan. 1 tax deal.
Republicans will continue to seek spending reductions as part of a long-term increase in the debt limit, said the Republican leadership aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
President Barack Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, said Friday in a statement, “We are encouraged that there are signs that congressional Re-publicans may back off their insistence on holding our economy hostage to extract drastic cuts” in spending.
“Congress must pay its bills and pass a clean debt limit increase without further delay,” Carney said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s spokesman, Adam Jentleson, said in a statement that the House must pass a “clean” debt limit increase. He didn’t address Cantor’s statement about requiring members of Congress to forfeit their pay if the chambers don’t adopt a budget.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement that the lack of a Senate-passed budget the past several years was a “shameful record that needs to end this year.”
Both chambers of Congress should lay out a “framework” of future government spending, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said Friday in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s Capitol Gains program airing Sunday.
“You can’t get out of this without passing a budget,” McCarthy said.
Political divisions in Congress pose limits to the ability of Republicans to achieve their long-term goals of deep cuts in spending, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin told reporters at the retreat Thursday.
Attaching a requirement that the Senate pass a budget to a short-term debt-limit extension would require Senate Democrats to spell out their spending plans.
Ryan said Republicans want “a two-way discussion between Democrats and Republicans and out of that hopefully some progress being made on getting this deficit and debt under control.”
The last time the Democratic-led Senate adopted a budget was in April 2009. The Senate and House are supposed to pass budget resolutions early each year to set a spending framework, though there is no enforcement mechanism. Without a budget resolution, appropriations bills allocate money for the federal government.
Leaders said the tactic of short-term debt-limit increases was used in the 1980s during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as a prelude to broader agreements on spending cuts.
“No one is talking about default, no one wants to default,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., who voted against the 2011 debt-ceiling deal, said in an interview Friday with Bloomberg Television. There is a “lot of support growing” among the rank and file for a short-term debt limit, he said.
The comments by Mulvaney and Ryan reflected the new political realities after Obama’s re-election that are spurring House Republicans to reassess their goals.
“If you get a little bit of reform for a little bit of extension” of borrowing authority, that “sounds like a pretty good deal,” Mulvaney told reporters. “If you can figure out a way to get little types of reform, little fixes for small extensions, I don’t find that objectionable.”
Obama has said he won’t negotiate the terms of a debt limit legislation the way he did in 2011, and he is demanding more tax revenue to accompany further spending cuts. Boehner has said that any increase in the debt ceiling would have to be accompanied by commensurate spending cuts.
Rep. John Fleming, R-La., said passing one or a series of short-term extensions may be effective in persuading Obama to discuss spending cuts because “he can’t get onto other agendas that he sees as important like immigration and gun violence while we are still wrangling every three months on debt ceilings.”
The last time Congress fought over raising the ceiling, Obama signed an increase on Aug. 2, 2011, the day the Treasury Department warned that U.S. borrowing authority would expire. Standard & Poor’s cut the nation’s credit rating.
“The worst thing for the economy is for this Congress and this administration to do nothing to get our debt and deficits under control,” Ryan said Thursday. “We think the worst thing for the economy is to move past these events that are occurring with no progress made in the debt and deficit.”
In recent weeks, conservatives from the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal to the Tea Party-aligned Americans for Prosperity had called on House Republicans to drop their conditions for raising the debt ceiling. Business groups had joined in, and Republican Party elders were growing nervous about how House leaders were approaching the debt ceiling, as well as the deadlines for automatic spending cuts and refinancing the government.
“House leadership by and large understands this series of fiscal inflection points we face present a dire threat to the Republican brand, which is already in big trouble,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican House member who remains close to the leadership. “If they’re seen as responsible for actions that further undermine the United States’ credibility in the world, and pushes us closer to falling into recession, Republicans could take a bath in the midterm election, which would be devastating.”
Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat, said Republicans could not hold their ground.
“What I think it shows is they realize the debt limit is an untenable position,” he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Roxana Tiron and James Rowley of Bloomberg News and by Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/19/2013