The temporary measure delays the budget debate until May.
Retreating with a purpose, Republicans sped legislation through the House today to avert the imminent threat of a government default but pointing the way to a springtime budget struggle with President Barack Obama over Medicare, farm subsidies and other benefit programs.The current legislation, which cleared the House on a bipartisan vote of 288-144, would permit Treasury borrowing to exceed the limit of $16.4 trillion through May 18. As it passed, Speaker John Boehner pledged that Republicans would quickly draft a budget that would wipe out deficits in a decade, and he challenged Democrats to do the same.
"I supported this legislation because it protects the full faith and credit of the United States by extending the debt ceiling for three months," U.S. Rep Charlie Dent, R-Lehigh Valley, said in a news release.
"This bill is just the first step, of many, that must be taken in the coming months to put our country on a path to prosperity," U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett, R-Warren, said in a news release.
The Democratic-controlled Senate is expected to approve the debt bill as early as Friday or perhaps next week. The White House welcomed the legislation rather than face the threat of a first default at the dawn of the president’s second term in the White House, and spokesman Jay Carney pointedly noted a “fundamental change” in strategy by the GOP.
"It is a disservice to the American people and a failure of leadership that the U.S. Senate has not passed a budget in over three years," Dent said.
House Republicans cast the bill as a way to force the Senate to draft a budget for the first time in four years, noting that if either house fails to do so, its members’ pay would be withheld. They called the bill “no budget, no pay,’” a slogan if not a statement of fact, since lawmakers would be entitled to collect their entire salaries at the end of the Congress with or without a budget in place.