Done deal

THE phrase “at the eleventh hour” seems to be taken quite literally in Washington. At midnight on April 8th the federal government was due to shut up shop, when the latest of the six stopgap spending measures it has been subsisting on this year in lieu of a budget expired without replacement. Despite weeks of negotiations the Republicans who run the House of Representatives and the Democrats who run the Senate seemed unable to agree on how much the government should spend, and on what, for the remaining six months of the fiscal year. It was not until 11pm that the two sides announced they had reached a deal to avert a government shutdown.

The deal will involve cutting almost $80 billion from Barack Obama’s proposed budget for the year, or roughly $38 billion from current spending levels. But it was not possible to put the details of the agreement into legislative language and vote on it before time ran out. Instead, the two chambers approved a seventh stopgap spending resolution, which was immediately whisked to the White House to receive the president’s signature. In fact, it did not arrive until after midnight, meaning that the government was theoretically out of action for a brief spell. The new measure puts it back in business until midnight on Thursday, by which point, if all goes according to plan, Congress will have had a chance to codify and vote on the grand bargain, thus finally putting this year’s budget to rest.

Congressmen from both parties are congratulating themselves on the historic nature of the deal. It does cut spending by an unprecedented amount, especially considering that half of the year has already passed. Moreover, it entails concessions from both sides. The Democrats agreed to far deeper cuts than they had wanted; the Republicans abandoned almost all of the ideologically-charged “riders” they had tried to slip into spending bills, undermining the Democrats’ health-care reforms, for example, or restricting the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gases. Instead the Democrats agreed to put some of these proposals to separate votes, knowing they will not pass the Senate. Mr Obama made a statement shortly after the agreement was announced full of stirring words such as “compromise”, “leadership” and “dedication”.

For all this heady talk, however, the deal-making has been far from edifying. The Democrats brought events to this pass by neglecting to pass a budget last year, when they had control of both the House and the Senate. The Republicans, for their part, refused to accept a Democratic offer to cut the very amount their own leaders had originally proposed back in February, $75 billion, and instead held out for $100 billion. Moreover, in a naked display of opportunism, they seemed willing to bring the government to a standstill over riders that had nothing to do with the budget.

And the worst is almost certainly yet to come. Within the next five weeks, Congress will have to raise the ceiling it imposes on the federal government’s debt. Many Republicans have indicated that they will not do so unless the Democrats agree to much more sweeping spending cuts than the ones that have proved so difficult to square away this week. As one senator put it while waiting to vote on the budget deal, “The debt ceiling is going to be Armageddon.” One hopes she did not mean it literally.

(Photo credit: AFP)