Congress boosts borrowing limit by $781b
Agrees to spend more than $100b on wars, programs
WASHINGTON -- Congress raised the limit on the federal government's borrowing by $781 billion yesterday, and then lawmakers voted to spend more than $100 billion on the war in Iraq, hurricane relief, education, healthcare, transportation, and heating assistance for the poor without making offsetting budget cuts.
On vote after vote in the House and Senate, lawmakers demonstrated the growing gap between their political promises to rein in spending and their need to respond to emergencies and protect politically popular programs. The votes followed last weekend's GOP leadership meeting in Memphis, where virtually every speaker called on the party to renew its commitment to fiscal discipline and to control federal spending and the deficit.
The House voted, 348 to 71, to approve a $92 billion measure to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and ongoing hurricane relief, after members rejected calls from conservatives to pay for at least some of that spending with budget cuts. On the other side of the Capitol, senators considering a budget blueprint for fiscal 2007 voted to effectively breach their own firm limits on spending by at least $16 billion to boost programs they said have been starved for funding for too long.
''You're talking about the guts of critical domestic programs," Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said after the Senate voted, 73 to 27, to increase spending on health, education, and labor programs by $7 billion more than the amount allotted in a budget blueprint for 2007. ''All the talk in Memphis doesn't comport with the reality of these important programs."
The budget squeaked by last night, by a 51-to-49 vote. Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, expressed regret that he could not hold President Bush's $873 billion line on discretionary spending, but he said negotiations with the House could bring spending back down. ''It's not everything I wanted, obviously, but it's a step in the right direction," he said.
With no brakes on spending and no moves afoot to raise taxes, the federal debt is now rising at an unprecedented clip. The government bumped up against its $8.18 trillion statutory debt ceiling last month, forcing the Treasury to borrow from employee pension funds to keep the government operating. After weeks of pleading from Treasury Secretary John Snow, the Senate took the politically unpalatable but economically critical step yesterday of raising the ceiling for borrowing to $8.96 trillion. Under House rules, the debt limit was raised last year without a vote when lawmakers approved a budget.
It was the fourth debt-ceiling increase in the past five years, following $450 billion in 2002, a record $984 billion in 2003, and $800 billion in 2004. The statutory debt limit has now risen by more than $3 trillion since Bush took office.
''This should be a wake-up call for every member of the Senate, every member of Congress, and a wake-up call for the president of the United States," said Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee. ''The question is: Are we staying on this course to keep running up the debt, debt on top of debt, increasingly financed by foreigners, or are we going to change course?"
Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and Republican of Iowa, acknowledged that the debt has risen at a remarkable pace, but said he and his colleagues had no alternative.
''Without an increase in the debt limit, our government will face a choice that we shouldn't make and we wouldn't want to make, a choice between breaking the law by exceeding the statutory debt limit or, on the other hand, breaking faith with the public by defaulting on our debt," he said.
There appeared to be little change of course yesterday. Following a two-day debate, the House approved $92 billion in funding for war costs and Hurricane Katrina recovery and added about $100 million for peacekeeping efforts in Sudan and to repair military sites on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. 