Senior Republicans on Capitol Hill have conceded that a budget deal is unlikely unless their controversial plan to overhaul Medicare is withdrawn, so the GOP is setting its sights only on areas where both parties can agree, such as cutting farm subsidies.
According to The Washington Post, on the eve of debt-reduction talks led by Vice President Biden, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Republicans remain convinced that reining in federal retirement programs is the key to stabilizing the nation’s finances over the long term. But he said the GOP recognizes that they may need to look elsewhere to achieve consensus after President Obama “excoriated us” for a proposal to privatize Medicare.
According to The Washington Post, on the eve of debt-reduction talks led by Vice President Biden, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Republicans remain convinced that reining in federal retirement programs is the key to stabilizing the nation’s finances over the long term. But he said the GOP recognizes that they may need to look elsewhere to achieve consensus after President Obama “excoriated us” for a proposal to privatize Medicare.
That search should start, Cantor said, with a list of GOP proposals that would save $715 billion over the next decade by ending payments to wealthy farmers, limiting lawsuits against doctors, and expanding government auctions of broadcast spectrum to telecommunications companies, among other items.
Democrats said they were encouraged by the move, which could smooth the way to a compromise allowing Congress to raise the nation’s debt limit and avoid a catastrophic national default.
“There’s common ground there,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, who is representing House Democrats in the Biden talks.
Lori Montgomery of the Post reports that the conciliatory tone signals the opening of a new and more consequential phase in the battle to design an affordable government for an aging society. After months of partisan brinkmanship over comparatively small cuts to the current budget, lawmakers returned to Washington this week to confront the harder problem of reducing a national debt that has risen to alarming levels.
They face a tight deadline: Without congressional action, the debt will hit the legal limit of $14.3 trillion in the next two weeks. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said he can juggle the books and pay the bills through Aug. 2, according to Montgomery’s report. But at that point, the U.S. government would risk a default on its obligations and economic disaster.
Congressional leaders in both parties are eager to avoid that outcome and are dispatching representatives to the Biden talks to try to hash out a debt-reduction accord that would make it easier for lawmakers to cast a politically difficult vote for additional borrowing.
Even the more austere spending plan drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and approved last month by the House would require an increase in the debt ceiling of about $1.9 trillion to cover the government’s bills through September 2012.
With voters growing increasingly anxious about the debt, Republicans and some Democrats are refusing to approve additional borrowing without an explicit strategy to reduce deficit spending. Raising the debt limit will be particularly difficult in the House, where the GOP majority is dominated by conservatives who have vowed to oppose any additional borrowing.
