WASHINGTON — Two of the three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation oppose the debt-ceiling bill approved tonight by the House of Representatives and awaiting a vote in the Senate on Tuesday.
Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., voted “no” on the measure, which passed the House 269-161. The vote included a dramatic moment when Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords appeared on the House floor for the first time since her shooting in January in Tucson. She hugged and kissed fellow lawmakers as those in the chamber applauded.
To Welch, the measure represents a boon for the wealthy and a slap in the face to other Americans.
“While I am pleased that, with this agreement, America will continue to pay its bills, I voted against it because it is not a balanced plan with shared sacrifice,” Welch said in a prepared statement. “It ignores glaring inequities in the federal tax code while cutting programs important to the middle class, seniors, and low-income Americans. There is simply no excuse for condoning continued tax breaks for Wall Street hedge fund managers, the ethanol industry and big oil companies while the middle class struggles to hang on to their jobs, pay their bills and send their children to college.”
Welch also complained that Republicans had employed “the tactic of putting a gun to the head of the American economy to advance” their agenda, calling the success of the GOP approach “regrettable.”
The Senate is expected to vote at noon Tuesday. Vermont’s senators have taken different stances, with Bernie Sanders, an independent, coming out against the bill and Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, saying he does not like aspects of the measure but would support it in any case.
“It is very clear that there will be devastating cuts to education, infrastructure, Head Start and child care, LIHEAP, community health centers, environmental protection, affordable housing and many, many other programs,” Sanders said in a prepared statement. He said he feared that a bipartisan deficit reduction committee to be set up as part of the bill would lead to “devastating cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ needs, while protecting the interests of the wealthy and large corporations.”Sanders said he doesn’t understand why the Obama administration didn’t press harder for eliminating Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy when polls show Americans want that.
“Most objective observers conclude that the Republicans have won this process in a rather extraordinary way and that they are rapidly implementing their program, which is to protect the wealthy and powerful,” Sanders told the Gannett Washington Bureau.
Leahy said the bill requires support because the alternative would be a default by the United States government that would harm Vermonters and other Americans.
“This is not a solution I would have preferred, but the compromise finally reached by the White House and congressional leaders has the potential to end this manufactured crisis,” Leahy said in a prepared statement. “It is a solution that puts common sense and the national interest above partisanship and ideology.”
In the hours before the House vote, White House officials said the vice president played a critical role in crafting a deal to avert the nation’s first-ever default.
That role began in the spring, when President Barack Obama tapped Joe Biden to begin bipartisan negotiations on getting the deficit under control. Biden opened those meetings in May, saying the negotiations were designed to “make sure each of us understands where the other guy is coming from.”Republicans walked away from the meeting table in June. Biden called for “shared sacrifice,” but Republicans said tax increases were not an option.But Biden and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky continued to talk, speaking four times on Saturday as the framework of a compromise on the debt ceiling began to emerge. At 11:30 p.m. Saturday, Biden returned to the White House to meet with members of the White House economics team and work the phones again.
“I thought it was safe to go home at 11:30 until the vice president arrived,” said Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director.
On Monday, Biden took on a job that may have been even tougher: selling the deal to Democrats on Capitol Hill.
“They expressed all their frustration,” Biden said after meeting for nearly two hours with House Democrats. “I’d be frustrated if I was sitting there as well, that we were taken down to the wire like this.”
Some House Democrats said after Monday’s meeting that the compromise is a win for tea party Republicans. They worried the deal would hurt programs for the poor and stand in the way of job creation.
“What’s the package about?” asked Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon. “It’s all about cutting, cutting, cutting. Tax cuts and reductions in spending are not going to create jobs. We need some investment. There isn’t a penny of investment in this. The next generation wants to become doctors? ‘Oh, sorry, you can’t get student financial aid.’”
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a non-voting congresswoman representing Washington, D.C., was asked what she thought about the deal.
“I don’t think,” she said. “I cry.”
Biden also played a key role in negotiating an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts with Republicans in December. The final deal reflected an agreement Biden arranged with McConnell that gave Republicans the estate-tax specifics they wanted in return for tax credits for low-income families.
The compromise package on the debt ceiling would cut more than $2 trillion in spending over the next 10 years. It would increase the country’s borrowing limit until 2013, as the administration wanted. But it also avoids higher taxes for the wealthy, as Republicans wanted.
Biden’s pitch received a “range of responses” in the Senate, said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.
“In general, I think the tone was that we achieved a number of positive things for the country, but there was an awful lot of, also, questions and regret about specific provisions, specific features,” said Coons, who holds Biden’s former Senate seat.
Following the meeting with House members, Biden walked into a hallway crowded with reporters and gave two thumbs up. He said his purpose wasn’t to convince, but to explain why the deal is important to the country.He said the “overwhelmingly redeeming feature” of the deal is that it would extend the debt limit until 2013, allowing the administration to talk about nothing except jobs until then.
“We have to get this out of the way to get to the issue of growing the economy,” he said. “This bargain does not prevent us from being able to continue to fund those initiatives within our budget that are the job creators: infrastructure, education and innovation.”
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