“We have to get this out of the way to get to the issue of growing the economy,” Biden said.
Senate Democrats seemed wearily resigned to accepting the agreement.
The Washington Post's Ezra Klein talks about how the GOP and Democrats came to an agreement despite contentious rhetoric on both sides of the debt ceiling debate and how the United States was able to avoid default. (Aug. 2)
Explore the House vote on the compromise debt-ceiling bill.
Debt deal’s policy winners and losers
“I just think we could not let the country go over a financial cliff,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) said after the meeting. “We had to make a decision here. We were not just in the ninth inning, we were in the bottom of the ninth and there were no extra innings and it was time to get this done.”
But House Democrats were, as a group, angry, saying that the democratic process had been overtaken by right-wing ideologues. Many Democrats complained that the White House had ignored them in its negotiations with Republicans. And many were furious that the final deal would do too little to protect programs for the poor, in their view, and would not live up to Obama’s pledge to have a “balanced” approach — higher tax revenue from corporations and the wealthy.
“We can try to sugarcoat it all we want. But the bottom line is, when Republicans started this debate, they said under no circumstances would they vote for any kind of compromise that had tax increases. And that’s just what they got,” said Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.).
Engel said Democrats were satisfied to avoid the government’s first default, which could have led to higher interest rates and sent shock waves through financial markets.
“But if you had told me that this would be the package a month ago, I would have asked you what you had been smoking,” he said.
For Republicans, the vote allowed them to achieve most of the spending cuts they had sought earlier this year in the budget drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
“Did we get 100 percent of the discretionary cuts we were looking for? No, we got two-thirds,” Ryan said at the news conference with Boehner and other GOP leaders. “That’s better than zero. I’ll take two-thirds in my direction than anything else, and we’re going in our direction.”
The dispute over the debt ceiling — which began with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s Jan. 6 letter to Boehner notifying him that the limit would soon be reached — has been so prolonged and come so close to the brink that there may have been no political victors.
The public recoiled at the legislative process. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted before Obama announced the deal late Sunday, 37 percent say they now see the president less favorably, about double the number (18 percent) who viewed him in a more positive light. Boehner suffered a sharper drop in his image, with about three times as many saying their opinion of him has deteriorated rather than improved over the past few weeks (34 percent less favorable; 11 percent more so).
Nearly three-quarters of Americans offered a negative word to describe how they viewed the budget negotiations. The top words were “ridiculous,” “disgusting” and “stupid.” Overall, nearly three-quarters of Americans offered a negative word.
Just 2 percent had anything nice to say.
Polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.
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