U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks during a press conference following the Senate Democratic Political Luncheon at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., May 31, 2023.
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty’s paintings
WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will try to hurry up a Senate bill on Thursday to lift the debt limit for two years and curb government spending as the US approaches its June 5 deadline to avoid debt defaults.
“The Senate will sit until we send the anti-insolvency bill to President Biden’s desk, we will work until the job is done,” Schumer, DN.Y., told the Senate at the opening of Thursday’s session. “Time is a luxury the Senate doesn’t have if we would like to forestall default.”
The fiscal responsibility bill was passed in the House of Republicans late Wednesday night by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, sending it to the Democratic-controlled Senate, which convened on Thursday and planned to take up the bill.
As a way to speed the bill through the chamber and vote on it before Monday, all 100 senators must conform to the plan and provides “unanimous consent” for the bill to bypass the Senate’s notoriously slow procedures.
Here’s the challenge: At the least three senators, Utah Republican Mike Lee, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul and Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine, have raised serious objections to certain parts of the bill.
On Thursday, Kaine introduced himself correction it will deprive the House of Representatives bill of a last-minute provision that almost guaranteed approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, West Virginia and Virginia’s controversial natural gas pipeline project.
Lee also proposed correctionto remove a line from the House bill that might allow the director of the Office of Management and Budget to unilaterally lift certain spending restrictions imposed on federal regulators in the event that they determined the spending was needed to “effectively execute the program.”
In a typical Senate process, these Members of Parliament are expected to decelerate the Senate’s deliberations on a bill, introduce amendments to it, try and pass those amendments and add them to the bill, and if successful, send the amended bill back to the House for one other vote.
But with only days left before the June 5 deadline set by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, at which point the US is more likely to default on its debt obligations, Schumer made it clear Wednesday that the bill couldn’t be reversed.
“We will not send anything back to the House,” he told reporters at the Capitol. “That will be insolvency, plain and easy.”
Economists agree that if the Treasury defaulted, it will likely shock global markets, cause US job losses, and jeopardize the delivery of essential government advantages that tens of hundreds of thousands of Americans depend upon to survive.
So what is the solution? As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained on Wednesday, senators who need to propose amendments will have the ability to achieve this so long as the amendments are doomed to failure.
In return for putting their amendments to a separate vote, McConnell hopes opponents will conform to a full Senate vote on the maximum debt bill before the weekend.
“I can say that I hope that those that have amendments, in the event that they get the votes, will turn back time in order that we are able to finish this Thursday or Friday,” McConnell told reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday.
Kaine, Paul and Lee gave little indication on Wednesday whether or not they were open to such a deal, but their Senate colleagues, the Capitol press corps and global markets anxiously awaited any sign of a compromise cope with Schumer.
Passing the compromise debt ceiling bill and sending it to President Joe Biden for signature “will calm the country and calm the markets,” McConnell said.
The Tax Liability Act is the results of a deal reached between Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and Biden that essentially gave the Conservatives several ideological political victories in exchange for their votes to lift the debt ceiling beyond next 12 months’s presidential election and into 2025.
The bill passed the House 314-117, with the support of more Democrats than Republicans.
This is an evolving story. Check for updates.