After months of planning, weeks of frenetic negotiating, and days of doubtful speculation, House Republicans on Wednesday passed a bill—barely—to lift the federal government’s debt limit and drastically cut spending. Now comes the difficult part.
After months of planning, weeks of frenetic negotiating, and days of doubtful speculation, House Republicans on Wednesday passed a bill—barely—to lift the federal government’s debt limit and drastically cut spending.The hard-fought “Limit, Save, Grow Act” is merely Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s opening bid to kickstart negotiations with President Joe Biden to secure deep budget cuts in exchange for not crashing the U.S. economy by.
Winning them over was painstaking, with the speaker and his top deputies working the House floor until the vote closed on Wednesday. Four conservative lawmakers voted no, the maximum McCarthy could lose while still passing the bill. Several more voted for it, but tepidly, and having spent days pointing out the legislation’s flaws.—a pariah from whom GOP leaders have repeatedly distanced themselves.” against the measure, found a way to be decisively for it.“I remain optimistic,” said Rep.
But in achieving some measure of unity for now, McCarthy may have shown how distant his conference is from a solution that would be palatable to the Democratic-led Senate and White House. Indeed, the bill that passed Wednesday was a grab-bag of Republican priorities, all melded into a package that pleased some and pissed off others. As written, McCarthy’s bill would broadly lower federal spending, cut back on social welfare programs and clean-energy tax credits, roll back huge swaths of Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, and rescind unspent COVID funds.
But months later, GOP leadership hardly followed that idealistic procedure for this debt ceiling bill—and the self-described principled conservatives who demanded change hardly balked because they were getting their way. There were signs the process had chafed on a GOP rank-and-file membership that prides itself on making the House more open and democratic. “It’s a better process than it’s been,” said Rep. Tim Burchett , one of the four Republicans to vote no. “It’s just—set-in-stone kind of things don’t always work and are not set in stone for certain people.”
But House Republican leadership will have to undertake the difficult work of keeping a strident conservative wing on board if faced with compromise—or, potentially, resolute Democrats who refuse to budge.
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