An increasing number of House members yielded to Speaker John Boehner’s blunt command to line up Wednesday behind his budget bill even as his staff moved frantically to alter it in an attempt to resolve the looming fiscal crisis. Congressional leaders alternately voiced optimism, determination and a haggard frustration as they struggled to make both the dollars and the votes add up.
The Congressional Budget Office, which on Monday night forced the Republican leaders back to the drawing board by ruling that their plan fell short of their promises, came back Tuesday with a verdict on Mr. Boehner’s latest revisions, declaring that they would cut spending by $917 billion over ten years. His plan would now raise the debt ceiling by $900 billion, requiring another set of decisions in just a few months.
"CBO’s analysis confirms that the spending cuts are greater than the debt hike – affirming that the House GOP bill meets the critical test House Republicans have said they will insist upon for any bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling," said Kevin Smith, the communications director for Mr. Boehner.
But the Senate’s majority Democrats unanimously lined up in opposition, sending Mr. Boehner a letter declaring that they all intended to vote against his plan if the House passed it.
Earlier in the day, the budget office told the Democratic side in the Senate that its approach, including savings claimed from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would produce $2.2 trillion in savings over 10 years — enough, if the Republicans would accept the assumptions, to raise the debt ceiling for long enough to avoid replaying the standoff next year in the middle of the 2012 election campaign.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said that with modest “tweaking” his proposal could now form the basis of a “true compromise,” but House Republicans seemed to be solidifying their own position, and the partisan momentum seemed to be pushing the two chambers ever further apart from an ultimate deal.
Although credit rating agencies continued to maintain a fairly sanguine stance considering the high stakes, the markets turned nervous. The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index declined more than 2 percent while the technology heavy Nasdaq composite fell 2.65 percent.
Members of the House Republican caucus said after a morning meeting that Mr. Boehner opened by urging the rank and file to “get your ass in line,” but then listened as many of them voiced lingering concerns.
Insisting to members that their bill, rather than the one offered by Senate Democrats, was the path to an agreement, Mr. Boehner added: “This is the bill. I can’t do this job unless you’re behind me,” recalled people who attended the meeting.
Mr. Boehner was able to solidify support for the proposal as some who opposed his proposal suggested they would change their minds.
“We’ve got this back and forth between have we cut enough, how much have we cut, how do we get a long-term solution on this.” said Representative James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma. “I like tea sweet enough to stand the spoon up in it,” he said. “This is not super sweet tea. But it is not unsweetened, either.”
Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, though, who remains opposed, said he would like to see more of the savings in the early years.
“This may be the last train leaving the station,” he said. “That certainly weighs on people’s minds.” But he added, “A lot of us recognize the most meaningful part of an agreement is what you’re willing to do immediately.”
Amid the bickering and tinkering, it was hard to see how a compromise might be reached in a matter of days. But despite the delays, it seemed that the Congressional machinery would ultimately grind its way past the stage of feinting and maneuvering, and toward actual voting on the House and Senate floors. Once the yeas and, just as important, the nays have been counted, the real bargain-making might resume.
“I think we’re going to solve this,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the assistant Democratic leader, said on NBC’s “Today” show. But he called the latest delay “a bitter lesson” and accused the Republican leadership, which had offered a plan that fell short in dollars and in the House whip count, of bluffing “with other people’s chips.”
“What we’re facing here is a Republican caucus that is basically showing its political bravery by giving up Medicare benefits for elderly people, by increasing the cost of student loans for working families, by cutting money for medical research,” he said.
Mr. Boehner’s troubles piled up late Tuesday afternoon when the Congressional Budget Office said his plan would cut spending by $850 billion during the next decade — about $150 billion less than the $1 trillion increase proposed for the debt ceiling.
On Tuesday morning, the budget office published its verdict on the competing plan offered, but not yet scheduled for a vote, by Senator Reid.
It would save $2.2 trillion over 10 years, less than the $2.7 trillion that the Democrats had claimed. Even discounting the savings allowed from the costs of the wars (about $1.04 trillion) and savings on interest as borrowing declines (about $250 billion), that would mean $900 billion in savings in a side-by-side comparison with the Republicans’ $850 billion as tallied by the budget office.
The scoring was better news for Mr. Reid than for Mr. Boehner, who quickly retreated from his bill once the budget office scored it on Tuesday night and was preparing to huddle with his caucus on Wednesday morning instead of moving to a vote on the floor.
House Republican leaders were forced on Tuesday night to delay a vote scheduled on their plan to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, as conservative lawmakers expressed skepticism and Mr. Boehner said he would come up with more cuts to satisfy the scorekeepers at the nonpartisan budget office.
The scramble to come up with a plan that could be put to a vote, now moved from Wednesday to Thursday, represents a test of Mr. Boehner’s ability to lead his restive caucus. The expected showdown over the legislation is the culmination of months of efforts by Tea Party-allied freshmen and fellow conservatives to demand a fundamentally smaller government in exchange for raising the federal borrowing limit.
Mr. Boehner, of Ohio, rolled out a two-stage plan on Monday that would allow the $14.3 trillion federal debt limit to rise immediately by about $1 trillion in exchange for $1.2 trillion in spending cuts. The plan tied a second increase early next year to the ability of a new bipartisan Congressional committee to produce more reductions.
The plan was met with skepticism — and in many cases outright rejection — by several conservative House members who said its savings did not go far enough. President Obama and most Congressional Democrats also have rejected the proposal, saying that it is only a short-term solution and that it could lead to market uncertainty and instability.
Republican leaders said they would probably rework it to in a way that would reflect the decreased savings by raising the debt limit by less than $850 billion. Such a change would mean that the Obama administration would need to make another request for an increase in a matter of months, making the deal even less palatable to Democrats.
“As we speak, Congressional staff are looking at options to adjust the legislation to meet our pledge,” Mr. Boehner said late Tuesday night in a prepared statement. “This is what can happen when you have an actual plan and submit it for independent review — which the Democrats who run Washington have refused to do.”
His spokesman, Mr. Buck, said on Wednesday that Mr. Reid, too, should rewrite his plan to account for the budget office’s critique.
“Speaker Boehner’s plan is not a compromise,” Mr. Reid said, after meeting with Senate Democrats, referring to the earlier version of the bill. “It was written for the Tea Party and not the American people. Democrats will not vote for it. Democrats will not vote for it. It’s dead on arrival in the Senate, if they get it out of the House.”
Before Mr. Boehner postponed the vote on his measure, the White House had sent a two-sentence message to Congress, saying that if the Boehner bill landed on Mr. Obama’s desk, “the president’s senior advisers would recommend that he veto this bill.”
Although Wall Street analysts and some Republicans expressed doubt that time would really run out on Aug. 2, leading to a possible default, the White House said that the Treasury’s estimate of the deadline was not a charade.
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner “has exercised all the wiggle room available to him,” said Jay Carney, the White House spokesman.
Moody’s Investors Service warned mutual fund clients that the impasse was threatening money-market mutual funds. “Direct risks include the potential for a missed interest or principal payment on government bonds for a short period of time, as well as incremental weakening of the overall credit quality of money-market fund portfolios that have U.S. government exposure,” the ratings company, based in New York, said in a statement.
The president of another rating agency, Standard & Poor’s, also said that deficit-reduction plans currently being considered in Congress could be sufficient to allow the United States to keep its triple-A credit rating.
But the official, Deven Sharma, disavowed recent news reports that quoted an S.&P. analyst as saying that Congress would need to achieve at least $4 trillion in deficit cuts over 10 years to maintain the country’s triple-A rating.
Mr. Sharma told a House subcommittee that the $4 trillion figure was “within the threshold” of what the agency thinks is necessary. But he declined to draw a bright line, saying only that “some of the plans” being considered on Capitol Hill could reduce the U.S. debt burden to a level that was “in the range of the threshold of a triple-A rating.”
Sarah Wheaton, Jada F. Smith and Jackie Calmes contributed reporting.
This report, "Boehner Issues Blunt Warning to Dissenters to Back Plan," first appeared in The New York Times.