16-day shutdown to end as Senate leaders reach deal
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Senate leaders announced a bipartisan deal yesterday to avert a threatened US default and reopen the federal government after a 16-day closure, a move intended to end a prolonged fiscal crisis that gripped Washington, battered Republican approval ratings and threatened the global economy with a new recession. Congress was gearing up to pass the measure before the day was out.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced a plan that would fund the government through January 15 and allow the Treasury to increase the nation’s borrowing authority through February 7.
Both the Democrat-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House of Representatives must approve the plan, which President Barack Obama would then sign before today’s deadline for Congress to increase the federal debt limit.
Obama applauded the Senate compromise and hoped to sign it into law, the White House said in a statement.
The US stock indexes jumped by more than 1 percent by late morning on news of a deal.
Reid, leader of Senate Democrats, thanked McConnell for working with him to end what had become one of the nastiest partisan standoffs in recent Washington history.
“This is a time for reconciliation,” said Reid.
McConnell said the time had come to back away for now from Republican efforts to gut Obama’s Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. But the feisty minority boss said Republicans had not given up on erasing the plan from the legislative books.
The crisis began on October 1 with a partial shutdown of the federal government after House Republicans refused to accept a temporary funding measure unless Obama agreed to defund or delay his health care overhaul law.
Democrats stand united
It escalated when House Republicans also refused to move on needed approval for raising the amount of money the Treasury can borrow to pay US bills, raising the specter of a catastrophic default. Obama vowed repeatedly not to pay a “ransom” in order to get Congress to pass normally routine legislation.
The hard-right tea party faction of House Republicans, urged on by conservative Texas Republican Ted Cruz in the Senate, had seen both deadlines as weapons that could be used to cut Obama’s health care overhaul, designed to provide tens of millions of uninsured Americans with coverage. The Democrats remained united against any Republican threat to Obama’s signature program, and Republicans in the House could not muster enough votes to pass their own plan to end the impasse.
Cruz said after the deal was announced that he would not block a vote. That was a key concession that signaled a strong possibility that both houses could act by day’s end. That, in turn, would allow Obama to sign the bill into law ahead of today’s deadline that Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew had set for action to raise the US$16.7 trillion debt limit.
The Senate plan’s passage in the Republican-controlled House likely will require House Speaker John Boehner to put the measure to a vote as is and depend heavily on minority Democrats to support it. The move is risky and seen as imperiling the House leadership, but Boehner was apparently ready to do it and end the crisis that has badly damaged Republican approval among voters.
Boehner and the House Republican leadership met in a different part of the Capitol to plan their next move. A spokesman, Michael Steel, said afterward that no decision had been made “about how or when a potential Senate agreement could be voted on in the House.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said the party had hurt its cause through the long and dangerous standoff.
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