WASHINGTON — It might be even more difficult than it appears for Congress to reach a broad deal to raise America’s borrowing limit and slash spending by Aug. 2. Maybe all but impossible.
Even if quarreling lawmakers can somehow agree this month, it is doubtful that Congress can write it up in binding fashion and pass it by one month from today.
That is when, the Treasury Department declared anew Friday, the government will start running short of money to pay the nation’s bills.
Congress could end up having to vote at least twice on the politically poisonous issue of raising the debt ceiling, now at $14.3 trillion, to avoid a first-ever government default.
Need time to digest it
The first vote would be on an interim raise, possibly in the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars, to give Congress time to wrap up a grand bargain allowing the government to go trillions of dollars deeper into debt in exchange for spending cuts and possibly higher taxes totaling an equal amount.
“It will take time, and that is a bit troublesome,” said Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, who represented Senate Republicans in budget talks led by Vice President Joe Biden. “Nobody wants this to be just parachuted in three days before they vote on it.”
Veterans of previous budget deals say there is no way President Barack Obama and Congress can meet the Aug. 2 deadline, even if a broad overall agreement is reached in the next two weeks. First, it could take weeks more for lawmakers and staff aides to implement that deal negotiated by the president and the two parties’ leaders.
Then, lawmakers would need time to examine and digest the legislation. And that’s hardly all.
“There’s the need to write it, the need to read it, the need to understand it, the need to score it, the need for it to be ‘real,’ the need for it to be processed and supported by each side’s base, the need to assemble the necessary votes,” said GOP lobbyist Eric Ueland, a former longtime Senate aide.
Clashes are a given
And that’s assuming everything goes according to plan — that the debt-budget pact doesn’t get blown up by a revolt from the Tea Party on the right or frustrated Democrats on the left. That’s a huge “if.”
GOP-controlled House panels and Democratic-led Senate committees with little experience working together will have to write up an agreement hatched by Obama and the top leaders in both parties.
Battles are unavoidable. The House and Senate agriculture committees, for example, will be asked to implement farm-subsidy cuts they either disagree with or would prefer to do in a more deliberate fashion later.
So what are the chances of threading the needle and getting a $2.4 trillion debt pact passed by Aug. 2?
“You can’t,” said Bill Hoagland, a former Senate GOP veteran of budget deals dating to the Reagan administration. “All I can think here is that if you had an agreement in principle, that then you would have an agreement to vote on a temporary increase in the statutory debt limit while the details are worked out and the legislative language is put together.”
