Congress racing clock on debt limit, spending
Four of 12 bills in the House are to come up for a vote this week
Four of 12 bills come up for vote this week
The repeal of Obamacare may be taking up most of the oxygen in Congress for now, but two other big battles are on the horizon.
Battle lines already are forming as Congress gets ready to take on the task of passing spending legislation to keep the government open and raising the national debt ceiling.
Deadlines for both are fast approaching.
The new fiscal year begins Oct. 1, yet neither the House nor the Senate has passed any of the 12 spending bills that keep the federal government running.
Budgets for the various federal agencies are divided among those 12 bills, so each receives scrutiny from congressional committees before it is passed by Congress.
But it has been more than a decade since Congress has adhered to the budgeting process, forcing lawmakers to cobble together comprehensive stop-gap spending bills like that one approved in May that covered the remainder of the current fiscal year.
The House will try to show it is making some progress this week, when it is scheduled to vote on a package of four security-related appropriations bills. The other eight measures have cleared the House Appropriations Committee, yet no vote for them has been scheduled on the House floor.
In the Senate, which has been stymied much of the summer over health care, three spending bills have been passed out of the Appropriations Committee but have yet to be considered by the full chamber.
Even if the two chambers were to pass spending measures, additional time will be needed for the House and Senate to resolve the differences between their bills, approve the final products and send them along to the president.
“We’ve got a train wreck coming,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., fumed recently.
Congress is to begin its summer recess next month, yet “we’ve got the debt limit, we’ve got no appropriations bill passed,” McCain said, pounding the lectern. “All of these things are piling up, and we’ve got about 30 days to do it in, and so far I have seen no plan, no plan to address these challenges.”
What’s more, Republicans are looking to tackle a major overhaul of the federal tax code — a time-consuming task that threatens to further divide the GOP and could complicate efforts to pass appropriations legislation and raise the debt ceiling.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is urging Congress to raise the national debt ceiling before it goes on break so that the government can continue to pay its bills and avoid a potentially devastating economic crisis.
The debt limit is the legal amount the Treasury can borrow to pay the government’s bills, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, tax refunds, interest on the national debt, and other obligations.
The current debt limit of $19.8 trillion was set March 16, but lawmakers gave the government no borrowing authority to surpass it.
Exactly when the government will run out of money is unclear, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected the Treasury would run out of cash in early to mid- October.
Mnuchin said recently the government has enough money to get through September without raising the ceiling. Yet many Republicans are reluctant to raise the limit unless it is accompanied by spending or regulatory changes.