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 Republicans were gauging support for the plan in anticipation of a
Wednesday House vote that would extend the U.S. Treasury's authority
to borrow through March 2015. The Treasury has said a cash crunch
could start after February 27, when it expects to exhaust any
remaining borrowing capacity.
The proposal from U.S. House Speaker John Boehner came after weeks
of internal party struggle. It is not the "clean" debt limit
increase sought by President Barack Obama, but falls far short of
past Republican demands for deep spending cuts that have provoked
political standoffs and a partial government shutdown last October
that rattled financial markets.
But passage of the House leadership plan will likely need Democratic
support after a number of Republican lawmakers expressed skepticism
about the cost of the proposal.
Members of both parties have shown support for canceling the 1
percent reduction in cost-of-living increases for non-disabled
military retirees of working age that was approved only in December.
Earlier on Monday, the U.S. Senate voted 94-0 to advance a similar
measure past a procedural hurdle.
"It's the only proposal I think that they felt that enough
Republicans and Democrats would vote for," Republican Representative
Matt Salmon said after party leaders unveiled the plan at a
closed-door meeting on Monday.
House Republicans previously considered various demands surrounding
a debt limit extension, including ordering approval of the
Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL oil pipeline and repealing some
provisions of the Affordable Care Act, Obama's signature healthcare
law.
But those were dropped because there would not be enough Republican
support to overcome the opposition of Democrats, Republican aides
said.
Salmon, who is from Arizona, said he believed as many as 150
Republicans and 100 Democrats would vote for a debt limit extension
linked to military pension relief, allowing it to pass.
House Democrats want to see how many Republicans intend to vote for
the debt limit plan before pledging support, a senior Democratic
aide said.
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SMALLER AMBITIONS
The more modest plan offered by Boehner follows three years of
partisan battles over the $17 trillion debt limit and other U.S.
fiscal deadlines, in which Republicans sought trillions of dollars
in deficit reduction, along with delays and denial of funding to
Obamacare.
Representative Mo Brooks said Boehner's plan would leave the United
States in a "more precarious" fiscal position.
"Right now, we've got a debt ceiling bill that increases spending,
which is diametrically, 180 degrees opposite of what we were
battling over just two years ago, where the question was how much in
spending cuts we were going to get," said the Alabama Republican.
Many Republican fiscal conservatives view the 2011 budget fight as
their most effective use of the debt limit as leverage because it
led to a deal to cut U.S. discretionary spending by some $2.1
trillion, including automatic, "sequester" cuts.
Repealing the pension cuts will cost $6.9 billion over 10 years, the
Congressional Budget Office said on Monday. Republicans propose to
pay for that by extending the sequester for another year, through
2024, for non-discretionary programs.
But Brooks, Salmon and other Republicans said those savings come too
far in the future and may never materialize.
(Reporting by David Lawder and Richard Cowan;
editing by Peter
Cooney)
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