NYtimes
May 31, 2011
By JACKIE CALMES
WASHINGTON — The House on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a measure to increase the government’s debt limit, acting on a vote staged by Republican leaders to pressure President Obama to agree to deep spending cuts.
Republicans brought up the measure, which was defeated 318 to 97, to show the lack of support in the House for raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling without concrete steps to rein in chronic budget deficits.
The preordained outcome followed several acts of odd political theater on the House floor: Republicans urged the defeat of their own measure, while Democrats — who not long ago were seeking just such a vote to raise the debt ceiling without attaching spending cuts — assailed Republicans for bringing it up, saying its certain defeat might unnerve the financial markets.
Just in case, Republican leaders scheduled the vote for after the stock market’s close, and in the preceding days called Wall Street executives to assure them that the vote was just for show, to show Mr. Obama that he would have to make concessions in budget negotiations if a debt-limit increase is to pass Congress.
“This vote, based on legislation I’ve introduced, will and must fail,” said Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee, objected. “This is a political stunt,” he said.
Voting against the measure were 236 Republicans and 82 Democrats. No Republicans voted in favor.
The showdown over the issue is likely to continue well into the summer, with consequences for both parties and, potentially, for the economy and Wall Street, where the bond market in particular is watching the partisan standoff closely. Yet for all the talk of crisis should Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2, when the Treasury Department says it will run out of room to meet all the government’s obligations without further borrowing, the financial markets are likely to yawn at Tuesday’s proceedings.
“Wall Street is in on the joke,” said R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
But beyond this week, Wall Street has reason to be nervous as the issue plays out, said people in both parties and in finance.
Investors have grown accustomed to partisan games of chicken that always end with the needed increase in the government’s borrowing authority. But this showdown, many say, is riskier because of the strongly held antispending, antitax views of the many freshman House Republicans combined with the fragility of the economic recovery.
“The people who are more politically savvy realize this may not be the normal brinkmanship,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. Nor, he added, is this standoff like the fight a few months ago over the current year’s spending, which ended with a late-night deal shortly before the government would have shut down.
“The thing that people are missing is that in shutting down the government you can go to the 11th-and-a-half hour, and the consequences of not doing it, while significant, are not economy-threatening,” Mr. Warner said. “You can’t go to the 11th-and-a-half hour on the debt limit. You don’t know what’s going to spook the bond markets.”
The chief wild card is the House Republican majority, which was elected last November after a campaign defined by voters’ antipathy toward budget deficits. More numerous than the insurgents elected in the conservative waves of 1980 and 1994, many freshman Republicans have no experience in public office and consider themselves citizen-legislators who entered government to shrink it, regardless of the political costs.
“The people who have been sent to Washington most recently are bringing a strong message from the Republicans more to the right that really want something done about government spending,” said Joseph E. Kasputys, founder of IHS Global Insight and an official in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Many House Republicans have said publicly that they either do not believe the government will default or that they do not fear it. Many embrace a proposal by Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a first-year Republican from Pennsylvania, for the Treasury to pay bondholders with incoming tax revenues and delay other government payments pending a resolution. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and many on Wall Street call the idea unworkable.
Many Republicans have also made comments indicating that they do not understand or do not care that an increase in the debt limit is needed not only for new spending but also to cover Social Security checks, military pay and myriad other obligations previously agreed to, as well as for payments to creditors holding Treasury bonds.
Another difference from recent decades, when the parties several times agreed to bipartisan budget-cutting deals to raise the debt limit, is the scale of spending cuts that Republicans are demanding as the price of support — up to $2 trillion in savings over a decade.
For Republicans and Democrats to agree this summer on such a far-reaching deficit reduction plan is a hurdle that is all the higher given how far apart the parties are. Republicans oppose any new taxes while Democrats say a balanced package must include higher revenues.
Just as the political dynamic is more precarious than in years past, so too, say some analysts, is the economic recovery. The combination “definitely makes it more dangerous” to even flirt with default, said Rick Rieder, a managing director of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment management firm.
“The practical ramifications of it are dramatic, and I truly believe this,” Mr. Rieder said. At some point short of actual default, he said, “you’re going to run down the road where the rating agencies are going to have to react, the Fed is going to have to make a set of decisions, international investors are going to have to interpret what this means, and you could functionally have a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of the risk while not actually having a default.”
“That is such a dangerous path to go down,” he said.
Not everyone believes an impasse would necessarily provoke economic damage. But much of the business community is concerned. “Am I the only one who remembers the split screen on TARP?” asked Mr. Josten.
He is not. Worriers from Washington to Wall Street increasingly recall how, amid the financial crisis of September 2008, House Republicans voted by a two-to-one ratio against the proposed Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as the bank bailout. Cable networks split screens, showing stock markets going down simultaneously with the House vote; the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 777 points, its largest single-day point drop.
Within days Congress approved a revised bailout and President George W. Bush signed it into law.
Jennifer Steinhauer and Carl Hulse contributed reporting.
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