|
Politico...
Mitch
McConnell: Forget perfect, make
deal
By David Rogers
7/26/11
Markets
slid Tuesday after a White
House veto threat and embarrassed House Republicans had to pull back
their debt
ceiling bill after new cost estimates showed the measure fell well
short of its
promised savings.
Speaker
John Boehner hopes to rebound
still with a floor vote Thursday, but his strong ally, Senate Minority
Leader
Mitch McConnell, warned that it is time for leaders of both parties to
“get back
together” and be prepared to accept a solution to the debt crisis
that’s “less
than perfect, because perfect is not achievable.”
Wall
Street clearly is beginning to
pay more attention to Washington’s turmoil as evidenced by the reaction
to the
veto threat, just days away from the risk of default. But the bigger
worry for
Boehner is his old tormentor, the Congressional Budget Office, which
gave his
bill a low enough score Tuesday that he will have to now go back and
rewrite
portions to better conform with his deficit-reduction goals.
The
speaker’s standard has been that
any increase in Treasury’s borrowing authority should be matched by
savings at
least as large. And in this case, his bill provides for a $900 billion
debt
ceiling increase that would be paired with 10-year caps on annual
appropriations bills.
Leadership
staff had been confident
that caps would produce more than $1 trillion in savings, but a CBO
report late
Tuesday shows that the 10-year deficit impact is closer to $850 billion
when
measured against the agency’s most current projections.
At
one level, Boehner is a victim of
his own success, since the CBO baseline is lower now by about $122
billion over
10 years because of the very same cuts the speaker won in April during
a
standoff with Obama over the 2011 budget.
Indeed,
the CBO’s numbers suggest that
all those months of struggle — during which the government was forced
to
operate on ever lower stopgap spending bills before a deal was reached
—
contributed another $57 billion in long-term savings on top of the $122
billion. White House Budget Director Jack Lew even jumped in with a
sympathetic
blog posting — albeit adding that he still opposes the Boehner bill.
Boehner’s
tea party conservatives, who
were never satisfied with the April deal either, will be less kind.
Read
the rest of the story at Politico
|
