Boehner's debt ceiling bill faces House vote

The AP reports: House Republicans are pressing ahead with a vote on a newly modified plan to stave off an unprecedented government default next week even though the legislation faces a White House veto threat and unanimous opposition among Senate Democrats.

As the House prepared to vote today, investor worries that a dysfunctional Congress might remain gridlocked sent stocks plunging. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped almost 200 points Wednesday, on top of a 92-point drop the day before.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, made headway with balky conservatives unhappy that the measure contains smaller spending cuts than a more stringent debt measure that passed the House last week. The new measure depends on caps on agency budgets to cut more than $900 billion from the deficit over the coming decade while permitting a commensurate increase in the nation's borrowing to allow the government to pay its bills.

Boehner acknowledged that the measure was hardly perfect but represented "the best opportunity we have to hold the president's feet to the fire. He wants a $2.4 trillion blank check that lets him continue his spending binge through the next election. This is the time to say no."

The White House threatened a veto, saying the bill did not meet President Barack Obama's demand for an increase in the debt limit large enough to prevent a rerun of the current crisis next year, in the heat of the 2012 election campaign.

Instead, Obama supports an alternative drafted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that contains comparable cuts to agency operating budgets but also claims savings from lowball estimates of war costs. Reid's plan would provide a record-breaking $2.7 trillion in additional borrowing authority, enough to tide the government over through 2012. Reid, however, is plainly short of the votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster.

While Boehner holds out hope that the Senate will pass his measure, a more likely outcome is a last-ditch effort to find a compromise.

In fact, Boehner's plan has enough in common with Reid's – including the establishment of a special congressional panel to recommend additional spending cuts this fall – that Reid hinted a compromise could be easy to snap together.

"Magic things can happen here in Congress in a very short period of time under the right circumstances," Reid told reporters.