You want to get attention on Capitol Hill? Threaten to lower the U.S. government credit rating.
The news that Standard & Poor's has lowered its outlook for the United States from "stable" to "negative" shot through congressional offices on Monday. An already-hot fight over raising the national debt got even hotter.
"Today S&P sent a wake-up call to those in Washington asking Congress to blindly increase the debt limit," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said in a statement released minutes after the news broke. "House Republicans will only move forward on the president's request to increase the debt limit if it is accompanied by serious reforms that immediately reduce federal spending and end the culture of debt in Washington."
On the other side, Democratic Rep. Peter Welch, of the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus, sent out a letter to Democratic leaders, signed by 114 House Democrats, demanding that Congress pass a debt-limit bill without any spending reforms at all. "Mr. Cantor should today abandon his dangerous plan to leverage America's duty to pay its bills to achieve a partisan advantage in budget disputes," Welch wrote.
Given all the maneuvering, you might think a debt-limit showdown is coming soon. It's not. Lawmakers, who are currently enjoying a two-week Easter recess, have plenty of time before they are required to act.
Two weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner sent a letter to congressional leaders with his best estimate of when the United States will actually hit the $14.3 trillion limit on its borrowing ability. It will happen in mid-May, Geithner told Congress, but the Treasury Department can take "certain extraordinary measures" to put the deadline off a little longer. Geithner said there will be "no headroom to borrow" left by July 8.
Maybe Geithner was trying to prod lawmakers to act quickly, but when Hill politicos read that, they immediately thought: We have loads of time. "It doesn't hafta hafta be done until July 8," says one GOP Senate source. "We've got all of May and all of June." Remember, the last crisis, averting a government shutdown, was literally settled at the 11th hour on the day the government was to have closed.
That's why Geithner took to the talk shows on Sunday to argue that there can't be shutdown-style brinksmanship this time. "If you take it too close to the edge, then people will start to wonder, really, what are we doing, what are we thinking," Geithner told ABC.
The treasury secretary is unlikely to get his wish. Both sides are so far apart, and feel they have so much time, that it's impossible to imagine the issue being resolved before the end of June, or maybe early July. Especially not with Speaker John Boehner telling President Obama that the White House can forget about getting a so-called "clean" bill, that is, one that raises the ceiling without other measures to control spending. "There will not be an increase in the debt limit without something really, really big attached to it," Boehner said at a fundraiser April 9.
But here's the problem for Republicans. They control the House of Representatives. The debt ceiling has to be raised -- Boehner has always conceded that -- and the party in power has to do it. Even as Boehner demands spending concessions as the price of raising the ceiling, the White House knows that in the end he will have to pass a bill. "Our bargaining power derives from our controlling the House but is also limited by it," says a House GOP source.
In the Senate, on the other hand, minority Republicans will be free to oppose any debt ceiling bill that isn't to their liking, because in the end it will be the Democrats' responsibility to pass it. Protest-minded Republicans are heartened by Obama's recent admission that his own vote against raising the debt ceiling in 2006 was "a political vote as opposed to doing what was important for the country."
"People know there is hypocrisy coming out of the White House," says the GOP Senate source. "Someone who took a political vote and let the other party pass the debt ceiling bill -- well, it's a little difficult for him now to say, you shouldn't do that."
The bottom line is, the debt ceiling issue won't be settled before an extended game of chicken, one in which Republicans will undoubtedly win some concessions but will, in the end, have to give in.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/ … z1JyjwymQj
by Mike Russo 10 days ago
The new House of Representatives is ready to shut down the government because they don’t want to pay for the countries bills that were accrued in the last fiscal year. So they want to hold the country hostage until they get what they want, which is to lower spending for the next fiscal year. ...
by Credence2 2 years ago
I stumbled upon a recent article the excerpt of it is below:The former chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) has a blistering response to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's, R-Ga., recent remarks about debt.According to HuffPost, Michael Steele was not pleased with Greene's adamant pushback...
by Sharlee 2 years ago
Chip Roy says he wants 'Green New Deal-type subsidies' stripped as part of a budget deal.Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, says he'll be pushing House Republicans to "unwind" parts of the "My main point is there's hardly anything radical about what we're suggesting by returning to what we were...
by lady_love158 14 years ago
http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?postid=240654We need to cut trillions not billions and unless we do we should not raise the debt ceiling! Obama is spending 4 trillion dollars a year even though historically revenues don't exceed more than 20% of GDP which for now is less than 3 trillion. That means we...
by Susan Reid 13 years ago
From that bastion of lamestream liberalism, TIME. Mr. Klein puts it so darned well I couldn't resist posting the whole article. It's not very long. Enjoy!Oh, and as we all know, there WAS no vote today (Thursday). ViewpointRepublicans’ Debt Ceiling Charade Is Downright DangerousBy Joe Klein...
by mio cid 14 years ago
The republican position is that under no circumstance will they allow any tax raise as part of the negotiations to raise the debt ceiling.They also want spending cuts, right now,significant in quantity,and across the board except on defense , when asked if the only way an agreement could be reached...
Copyright © 2025 The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers on this website. HubPages® is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.
Copyright © 2025 Maven Media Brands, LLC and respective owners.
As a user in the EEA, your approval is needed on a few things. To provide a better website experience, hubpages.com uses cookies (and other similar technologies) and may collect, process, and share personal data. Please choose which areas of our service you consent to our doing so.
For more information on managing or withdrawing consents and how we handle data, visit our Privacy Policy at: https://corp.maven.io/privacy-policy
Show DetailsNecessary | |
---|---|
HubPages Device ID | This is used to identify particular browsers or devices when the access the service, and is used for security reasons. |
Login | This is necessary to sign in to the HubPages Service. |
Google Recaptcha | This is used to prevent bots and spam. (Privacy Policy) |
Akismet | This is used to detect comment spam. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Google Analytics | This is used to provide data on traffic to our website, all personally identifyable data is anonymized. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Traffic Pixel | This is used to collect data on traffic to articles and other pages on our site. Unless you are signed in to a HubPages account, all personally identifiable information is anonymized. |
Amazon Web Services | This is a cloud services platform that we used to host our service. (Privacy Policy) |
Cloudflare | This is a cloud CDN service that we use to efficiently deliver files required for our service to operate such as javascript, cascading style sheets, images, and videos. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Hosted Libraries | Javascript software libraries such as jQuery are loaded at endpoints on the googleapis.com or gstatic.com domains, for performance and efficiency reasons. (Privacy Policy) |
Features | |
---|---|
Google Custom Search | This is feature allows you to search the site. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Maps | Some articles have Google Maps embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Charts | This is used to display charts and graphs on articles and the author center. (Privacy Policy) |
Google AdSense Host API | This service allows you to sign up for or associate a Google AdSense account with HubPages, so that you can earn money from ads on your articles. No data is shared unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Google YouTube | Some articles have YouTube videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Vimeo | Some articles have Vimeo videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Paypal | This is used for a registered author who enrolls in the HubPages Earnings program and requests to be paid via PayPal. No data is shared with Paypal unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Login | You can use this to streamline signing up for, or signing in to your Hubpages account. No data is shared with Facebook unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Maven | This supports the Maven widget and search functionality. (Privacy Policy) |
Marketing | |
---|---|
Google AdSense | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Google DoubleClick | Google provides ad serving technology and runs an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Index Exchange | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Sovrn | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Ads | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Unified Ad Marketplace | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
AppNexus | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Openx | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Rubicon Project | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
TripleLift | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Say Media | We partner with Say Media to deliver ad campaigns on our sites. (Privacy Policy) |
Remarketing Pixels | We may use remarketing pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to advertise the HubPages Service to people that have visited our sites. |
Conversion Tracking Pixels | We may use conversion tracking pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to identify when an advertisement has successfully resulted in the desired action, such as signing up for the HubPages Service or publishing an article on the HubPages Service. |
Statistics | |
---|---|
Author Google Analytics | This is used to provide traffic data and reports to the authors of articles on the HubPages Service. (Privacy Policy) |
Comscore | ComScore is a media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers. Non-consent will result in ComScore only processing obfuscated personal data. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Tracking Pixel | Some articles display amazon products as part of the Amazon Affiliate program, this pixel provides traffic statistics for those products (Privacy Policy) |
Clicksco | This is a data management platform studying reader behavior (Privacy Policy) |