Why the Senate isn’t jumping at the opportunity to end the debt crisis – By Burgess Everett (Politico) / April 26, 2023
As the House GOP struggles to pass its plan, Washington could soon look to the chamber with a track record of bipartisan deals — where nothing is happening.
The Senate still isn’t ready to save the day on the debt ceiling.
As the House GOP scrambles to pass its ultimately doomed bid to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, across the Capitol almost no one is working to devise legislation that can overcome a Senate filibuster, win a House majority and get President Joe Biden’s signature. And time is ticking: Financial analysts are increasingly worried that the nation could default on its debt by early June if the limit isn’t raised
The House bill “is a start, but it’s only a start,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said in an interview. He added that he hopes negotiations will start soon but acknowledged they might not until “we finally get the x-date” — Treasury’s updated estimate of when the ceiling will be breached. “Then we probably got about six weeks to solve it.”
Tillis and his 48 Senate GOP colleagues are nonetheless praying that Speaker Kevin McCarthy can muscle through his opening pitch to give their party a modicum of leverage over the coming weeks. A McCarthy failure would make it much harder for 10 or more Republican senators to extract any concessions at all from the president as a condition for raising the borrowing limit.
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