US House passes debt limit bill in bipartisan vote to avert default

The House on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed legislation negotiated by US President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to suspend the debt ceiling and set federal spending limits, as a broad bipartisan coalition lined up to cast a critical vote to pull the nation back from the brink of economic catastrophe.

The Bill would defer the federal debt limit for two years — allowing the government to borrow unlimited sums as necessary to pay its obligations — while imposing two years of spending caps and a string of policy changes that Republicans demanded in exchange for allowing the country to avoid a disastrous default. The 314-to-117 vote came days before the nation was set to exhaust its borrowing limit, and days after a marathon set of talks between White House negotiators and top House Republicans yielded a breakthrough agreement. With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the Bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks. On the final vote, 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats backed the measure, while 71 Republicans and 46 Democrats opposed it.

 

McCarthy’s win risks his job as speaker

Five months ago, Kevin McCarthy had just overcome a humiliating 15 rounds of voting by making big concessions to conservatives to earn his gavel as House speaker. On Wednesday, McCarthy won over just enough of those hard-liners — even as some of them threatened to oust him. 

He persuaded more than two-thirds of his party but there was still one problem: more Democrats backed it than Republicans, a fact conservative critics will use to argue the speaker made a bad deal.

And so McCarthy’s most triumphant moment as speaker is also his most fraught.  He must hold at bay restive right-wing lawmakers angry that the speaker couldn’t wrest from Biden even deeper spending cuts and restrictions for social programs, and they’re now weighing whether to try to replace him.    Bloomberg