The bipartisan bill to suspend the US debt ceiling just days before a catastrophic and unprecedented default was on its way to Joe Biden’s desk for final consent.
The bill will get to the President’s office on Friday after passing the US Senate late on Thursday with 63 votes to 36.
Biden acknowledged that the approval of the compromise package negotiated between Biden and the House speaker leaves neither Republicans nor Democrats fully pleased with the outcome. But the result, after weeks of torturous negotiations, shelves the volatile debt ceiling issue until 2025, after the next presidential election.
“No one gets everything they want in a negotiation, but make no mistake: this bipartisan agreement is a big win for our economy and the American people,” he tweeted.
The bill had several amendments – many of them from Senate Republicans who were concerned that the debt ceiling bill passed by the House did too little to check government spending.
As part of the negotiations over the bill, McCarthy successfully pushed for modest government spending cuts and changes to the work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Programs. Those changes were deemed insufficient by 31 Republican senators, who echoed the criticism voiced by the 71 House Republicans who opposed the bill a day earlier.
The Senate minority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, supported the bill but agreed that further actions must be taken to tackle the federal government’s debt of more than $31tn.
Senate Democrats lobbied against some provisions in the bill, like the expedited approval of the controversial Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline. Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat of Virginia, introduced an amendment to remove the pipeline provision from the underlying debt ceiling bill, but that measure failed together with the 10 other proposed amendments.
In a bid to prevent a once-routine vote to allow the nation’s debt limit to be lifted without concessions, McCarthy brought Biden’s White House to negotiate and reach an agreement that forces spending cuts aimed at checking the nation’s deficits.
According to said Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat, “the fact remains that the House majority never should have put us at risk of a disastrous, self-inflicted default in the first place. We should prevent the debt ceiling from being used as a political hostage and stop allowing our country to be taken up to the edge of default.”