Budget deal

Congress passes budget deal

The agreement will boost domestic and defense spending, while extending the debt limit until March 2017.

By Seung Min Kim

The Senate passed on Friday a sweeping two-year budget deal that also extends the debt limit through the end of Barack Obama’s presidency — buying lawmakers some fiscal breathing room after years of bitter budget battles.

 Shortly before 1:30 a.m. senators voted 63-35 to advance the accord negotiated between top Hill leaders and the White House — the final legislative accomplishment of now-former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who officially handed the reins of the House to Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Thursday. And just after 3 a.m., senators passed the budget agreement with a 64-35 vote – sending it to Obama to be signed into law.

For Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the agreement achieves his two chief goals: It helps avert a government shutdown and a default on the nation’s debt. And Senate Democrats successfully extracted spending increases for domestic programs, collecting dividends from a risky strategy cooked up this summer to block all appropriations bills to try and force Republicans into budget negotiations.

“This agreement isn't perfect,” McConnell said Thursday. “But here’s the bottom line. This is a fully-offset agreement that rejects tax hikes, secures long-term savings through entitlement reforms, and provides increased support for our military — at a time when we confront threats in multiple theaters.”

But it was that sense of compromise that opened up McConnell to scathing attacks from fellow Republicans eager to distance themselves from the budget deal — not the least of whom was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who took to the Senate floor on Thursday night to eviscerate McConnell as the “most effective Democratic leader in modern times.”

Just hours before the scheduled procedural vote on the budget, Cruz — who is running for the GOP presidential nomination — delivered a fiery anti-McConnell speech while dismissing the fiscal deal as a blank credit card from Republicans to Obama that is “encrusted in diamonds and glows in the dark.”

"I've got to say, Leader McConnell has proven to be a very effective Democratic leader. With just 46 Democrats, the outcome is exactly what Harry Reid and the Democrats would want," Cruz said of the budget agreement. "Is this not a curious state of affairs? Why is a Republican majority leader fighting to accomplish the priorities of the Democratic minority.”

Cruz’s remarks overshadowed a speech from yet another GOP presidential contender who chose not to make it so personal: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who for days repeatedly threatened to filibuster the budget agreement even though he had no realistic options for trying to stop the measure from advancing,

“We will be raising the debt ceiling in an unlimited fashion,” Paul said in a speech lasting just under 20 minutes. “We will be giving President Obama a free pass to borrow as much money as he can borrow in the last year of his office. No limit, no dollar limit. Here you go, President Obama. Spend what you want.

Meanwhile, everybody — but Republicans in particular — seemed to have plenty to dislike about the budget agreement, which would add $80 billion in spending over two years paid for by a hodgepodge of offsets, and another $32 billion for each of the next two years through a war contingency fund.

A vocal protest by aggrieved farm-state lawmakers over $3 billion in cuts to crop insurance — one pay-for in the budget agreement — threw last-minute complications into the negotiations.

But congressional leaders assured senators those cuts would be reversed in the omnibus spending bill due in December — a deal that helped move a handful of farm-state votes but irritated fiscal conservatives who complained that the savings in the budget deal were already getting undermined.

“Many of the offsets are creative gimmicks,” complained Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). “And some of the offsets aren’t even that creative.”