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National
Journal
House Republicans Map Out
Strategy for Debt-Ceiling Battle
By
Nancy Cook
January
31, 2013
When
House Republicans return from recess next week, one of their
top priorities will be charting out the next fiscal battle -- the debt
ceiling.
Tea
party members view this as a key time to extract serious cuts
to entitlement programs from President Obama and the Democrats. “This
is going
to be where the rubber meets the road,” Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan.,
said before
Congress left Washington roughly two weeks ago.
The
trick for the Republican caucus will be holding together its
members; maintaining some leverage over the negotiations; and
simultaneously,
not allowing the party reputation to be damaged by any fiscal
brinksmanship, or
by failing to raise the debt ceiling and defaulting on the nation's
debt.
While
the appetite seems low for a massive showdown like the
debt-ceiling fight of the summer of 2011, particularly as the
Republican Party
does some soul-searching on how to best present itself on fiscal and
economic
issues, House Republicans have continued their aggressive rhetoric.
Extracting
“dollar-for-dollar [spending cuts] is the plan,” House Speaker John
Boehner
told reporters just before recess. Huelskamp is quick to say that he
and his
fellow tea party members want a debt-ceiling compromise to include cuts
in
funding or major structural changes to Medicare, Medicaid, the
Affordable Care
Act, and food stamps.
Indeed,
House Republicans are approaching the debt ceiling with a
renewed measure of confidence. They think the White House botched the
sequester
negotiations by painting the across-the-board spending cuts as dire
economic
bombshells that would hit in early March. So far, the cuts have not
caused any
major economic damage, though forecasters have always predicted that
the full
weight of the cuts would not be evident until July or August.
"The
hyperbole surrounding the sequester and the way the
White House played it out was surprising to me. Their ability to lead
right now
is really diminished," Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., told National Journal
Daily…
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the rest of the article at The National Journal
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