GOP moves to delay debt-ceiling showdown

WASHINGTON — Seeking to regain their budget footing, Republicans controlling the House are moving to try to defuse a potential debt crisis with legislation to prevent a first-ever U.S. default for at least three months.

The Republicans are giving up for now on trying to extract spending cuts from Democrats in return for an increase in the government’s borrowing cap. But the respite promises to be only temporary, with the stage still set for major battles between the GOP and President Barack Obama over taxes, spending and deficits.

The first step comes Wednesday with a House vote on GOP-sponsored legislation that would give the government enough borrowing leeway to meet three months’ worth of obligations.

Republicans leaving a two-hour meeting Tuesday afternoon appeared confident that the measure would pass.

While it’s commonly assumed that the Treasury Department wouldn’t allow a disastrous default on U.S. Treasury notes, the prospect of failing to meet other U.S. obligations such as payments to contractors, unemployment benefits and Social Security checks would also be reputation shattering. House Speaker John Boehner, ROhio, and other leaders have made plain they don’t have the stomach for it.

The legislation is disliked by many Democrats, but the White House weighed in Tuesday with a statement that the administration would not oppose the measure.

What was important to the White House was that the GOP proposal separated the debt ceiling from other upcoming fiscal target dates and signaled that, at least for now, Republicans were not going to demand a dollar of spending cuts for every dollar of federal borrowing.

It also appeared that Senate Democrats would grudgingly accept the bill.

The idea driving the move by GOP leaders is to re-sequence a series of upcoming budget battles, taking the threat of a potentially devastating government default off the table and instead setting up a clash in March over automatic across-the-board spending cuts set to strike the Pentagon and many domestic programs. Those cuts — postponed by the recent “fiscal cliff” deal — stem from the failure of a 2011 deficit supercommittee to reach an agreement.

These across-the-board cuts would pare $85 billion from this year’s budget after being delayed from Jan. 1 until March 1. The cuts were never intended to take effect but were instead aimed at driving the two sides to a large budget bargain to avoid them.