The House on Wednesday approved the debt limit agreement between Chairman Kevin McCarthy and President Biden by 314 to 117.
71 Republicans opposed the deal, saying it went too far for White House demands, while 165 Democrats voted in favor.
The deal, which suspends the debt limit until January 1, 2025, now moves to the Senate — where senators have begun demanding amendments to the bill. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said there is no time to send an amended version back to the House before the nation runs out of money to pay its bills — and is trying to force a quick vote.
sec. Janet Yellen has said the US only has until June 5 before the Treasury runs up to the $31.4 trillion in borrowing limit.
The bill limits national security spending to $886 billion in fiscal year 2024 — in line with President Biden’s budget request — and limits it to $895 billion by 2025, a one percent increase.
The House approved the debt limit agreement between Chairman Kevin McCarthy and President Biden on Wednesday
It raises the debt ceiling through January 2025, recoups about $29 billion in unspent COVID funds, ends the pause in Biden’s student loan payments, and cuts $1.9 billion — plus another $20 billion in the future. future – of the $80 billion for new IRS agents.
It also leaves non-defense discretionary spending unchanged in 2024 and allows for a one percent increase in 2025 – which essentially amounts to spending cuts since inflation is not taken into account.
“Tonight the House took a critical step forward to avoid a first-ever bankruptcy and protect our nation’s hard-earned and historic economic recovery,” Biden said in a laudatory statement Wednesday night.
Members of the ideological far-right and far-left expressed opposition to the deal, known as the Fiscal Responsibility Act, ahead of the vote.
Republicans lined up to oppose the deal even faster than Democrats — and the House Freedom Caucus formally forced its members to vote against it.
GOP leadership was forced to play defensively after their conference’s right wing argued that the deal was not conservative enough and gave in too much to the White House.
“To say we didn’t push [the White House] on the edge, to say we haven’t maxed out the negotiations, it’s just an uninformed position… it’s just really unfortunate that people put us in the situation,” chief negotiator Garret Graves told reporters on Wednesday.
“They don’t understand what’s in the bill,” chief negotiator Patrick McHenry, RN.C., told reporters of his colleagues who said they would vote “no.”
Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said McCarthy promised to deliver about 150 GOP votes, meaning McCarthy was counting on about 70 dropouts.
In the rule vote, the bill passed 314 to 117 on Wednesday evening
McCarthy had to walk a careful line to broker a deal with the Democrats that will avoid catastrophic bankruptcy and hold on to his speakership.
Freedom Caucus members hesitant to suspend the debt ceiling until 2025, as agreed in the deal, have floated the idea of filing a motion to leave — in which a member can force a vote on the House floor to to oust McCarthy.
Chief Negotiator Rep. Garret Graves tore up Freedom Caucus members who publicly railed against the deal even before the text was released.
When asked about Roy’s criticisms, Graves told reporters “some confidence was lost.”
“There really was, and I’m really offended.”
Rep. Chip Roy said there would be a “reckoning” if the deal went through, and “we’ll then have to regroup and figure out the whole leadership arrangement again.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Dan Bishop, RN.C., called the deal a “s*** sandwich” and insisted the motion to leave was on the table.
On Wednesday, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., McCarthy “should be concerned” about a motion to leave after the deal is passed.
“He will win the vote tonight, but after this vote we will discuss whether there should be a motion to leave or not,” he told CNN.
Jeffries did not rule out the possibility of the Democrats intervening to save McCarthy’s speakership, fearing that the Republican alternative would be less pragmatic.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” Jeffries told reporters, adding that Democrats haven’t discussed a “hypothetical.”
The debt limit deal includes $136 billion in spending cuts over the next two years — barely a dent in the country’s more than $30 trillion in debt. But even libertarian-minded Representative Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said when announcing he would support the deal, “I’ve been in Congress for 10 years and this is the first real bill to make cuts.”
He added that he hoped for further cuts in the 12 appropriation bills that Congress must pass later this year.
Congress is also required under the new bill to pass 12 annual spending bills or face a fallback to the previous year’s spending limits.
The bill also expands work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — even though the changes are a watered-down version of what conservatives really want.
While there are already work requirements for most able-bodied adults between the ages of 18 and 49, the bill raises the age limit to 54, but has an expiration date and would reduce the age to 49 by 2030.
The agreement would also make it harder for states to waive work requirements for SNAP by lowering the number of state-level exemptions allowed each month.
Democrats also won some new expanded benefits for veterans, the homeless and youth aging out of foster care. And in a last-minute snafu for Republicans, a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report actually said the amount spent on SNAP would increase by $2.1 billion given the new waivers.
The deal also stipulated that student loan payments would resume on August 29, but did not end President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program as Republicans had hoped.
The deal cuts some $21.4 billion from the IRS, which received another $80 billion in funding from the Democrats’ last congress, but only immediately claws back $1.4 billion. White House officials said Biden agreed to move $10 billion from the IRS to other funding priorities in fiscal year 2024 and another $10 billion in fiscal year 2025.
It also allows Congress to reclaim about $30 billion in unused Covid-19 aid funds, but it remains to be seen whether states will actually return the money or find ways to spend it.
The deal also included allowing reform provisions—and, curiously, stipulated an approval of West Virginia’s Mountain Valley Pipeline—that Senator Joe Manchin, DW.Va., had pushed for.