Congress is racing to speed up vote on debt ceiling agreement

WASHINGTON — Despite the announcement of a crucial deal to raise the federal debt ceiling over the weekend between Democratic President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican, lawmakers are having a hard time dealing with the resolution after returning to Washington on Tuesday from the Memorial Day recess.

Lawmakers in the House and then the Senate have just five days before June 5, the latest date set by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, as the deadline for the U.S. government to begin defaulting on its financial obligations.

The new 99-page agreement suspends the borrowing limit for two years and limits government spending during that period. It would cut spending on Democrats' preferred domestic priorities, while boosting military spending by about 3%. It also expands restrictions on federal food aid to induce beneficiaries to find jobs.

Biden and McCarthy face strong domestic opposition from both the Democratic Progressive Party, which rejects any spending cuts in welfare programs, and the hard-right Republican Party, which believes the deal has not gone far enough to curb federal spending.

Beyond these differences, procedural points and obstacles are surfacing both in the House of Representatives and the Senate, which could complicate the quest to avoid an unprecedented default by next Monday.

Ideological dilemmas

The deal raises the current debt limit of $31.4 trillion through 2025 with a cap on discretionary non-defense spending of $704 billion for fiscal 2024. The Republican Party resisted the Democratic demand for parity between defense spending and welfare. The deal increases defense spending by about 3 percent in fiscal 2024 and raises it to $895 billion in fiscal 2025. The hard-line Republican Party believes this is below the rate of inflation increase and is nowhere near the level needed to counter growing global threats, especially from China. On the other hand, members of the Democratic Progressive Movement expressed their rejection of Biden's concessions, foremost of which is the sacrifice of social and food benefits for the unemployed elderly. That prompted a number of members of Congress from both parties to pledge to vote for the resolution.

Procedural obstacles

After the new deal was reached, Biden and McCarthy spent much of the weekend promoting the agreement among their party lawmakers. In both chambers, opponents of the bill could slow its passage, threatening to derail efforts to avoid a US government default for the first time in its history.

Some conservatives in the House and Senate have said they oppose the deal because it doesn't go far enough to limit federal spending, while some progressives accuse Biden of acquiescing to drastic spending restrictions.

McCarthy said at a news conference on Sunday that he expected more than 95 percent of House Republicans to support the bill, and the House is expected to begin reviewing the bill on Wednesday before voting on it begins.

During his bid to become speaker of the House of Representatives in January, McCarthy made a series of procedural concessions to hardline lawmakers that now complicate his ability to pass the deal. The House of Representatives will not put the bill to a vote until Wednesday, part of a deal McCarthy struck to give lawmakers 72 hours to read the text before voting on the bill.

Even before it reaches the moment of voting on it by all members of the House of Representatives, the bill will need to go through the House Rules Committee, and McCarthy has appointed 3 hardline conservatives to the committee, as part of his election deal to become speaker of the House, and it is not yet known how they will vote, so McCarthy is counting on the support of Democratic members for the bill.

Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, a member of the party's Progressive Movement, said a "large majority" of Democrats in the House of Representatives were "constantly changing their position" on whether or not they would support the deal.

If the House approves the proposed bill tomorrow, it will face a compressed Senate timetable that could take days to pass, in part because House Republicans have used the only opportunity they have had to cut short the Senate's long procedural hurdles. Most Senate bills are subject to two votes, a vote in which the Senate agrees to stop the debate, and then move on to final approval by voting on the bill.

A move to a final vote would require a majority of 60 votes and could be added for several days in the event of opposition amid the sharp split in the chamber, which is made up of 51 Democrats to 49 Republicans.

Some experts argue that even if the government defaults on some bills on time on June 5 due to obstructions in Congress, there will be no wide-ranging consequences, as markets will treat this default as a procedural delay rather than a fundamental failure by the US government to meet its obligations.