US Senate passes debt plan to avert default

Washington:  The Senate voted Tuesday to raise the government's debt ceiling and cut trillions of dollars from its spending, finally ending a fractious partisan battle just hours before the government's borrowing authority was set to run out.

The bill, which passed 74 to 26 after a short debate devoid of the oratorical passion that had echoed through both chambers of Congress for weeks, was headed for the White House, where President Obama was poised to sign it immediately.

A few minutes later, Mr. Obama said he would sign the bill right away, but excoriated his opposition for what he called a manufactured crisis that could have been avoided. "Voters may have chosen divided government," he said, "but they sure didn't vote for dysfunctional government."

The compromise, which the House passed on Monday, has been decried by Democrats as being tilted too heavily toward the priorities of Republicans, mainly because it does not raise any new taxes as it reduces budget deficits by at least $2.1 trillion in the next ten years. But it attracted many of their votes, if only because the many months of standoff had brought the country perilously close to default.

The wrangling also laid bare divisions within both parties, in the House when scores of the most conservative Republican members and most liberal among the Democrats refused to vote for the bill, and again in the Senate where senators such as Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Mike Lee of Utah, both Republican freshmen blessed by the Tea Party last year, voted against it. The last to vote was Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, who conferred for several minutes with Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, her face twisted in a grimace, then voted yes, as he had done. Ms. Snowe, who faces re-election next year, is already a target of Tea Party activists in her state.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, who played a central role in arriving at the ultimate compromise, said his party's goal was "to get as much spending cuts as we could from a government we didn't control."

"It may have been messy," he said. "It may have appeared to some that their government wasn't working, but in fact the opposite was true." Legislating, he added, "was never meant to be pretty."

He and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, had a gentle toe-to-toe as the debate ended, praising each other's performance while denouncing each other on the substance.

"It's never, ever personal," Mr. McConnell said.

Mr. Reid presaged the next battle, when an appointed Congressional committee is to seek new ways to cut the deficit, by rejecting the Republican's assertions of his Republican colleagues that the next phase would again exclude revenue increases, which the Democrats failed to include in the first round. "That's not going to happen," Mr. Reid said.

Mr. Obama, too, called for the ultimate solution to include new revenues, including higher taxes by the wealthiest Americans and closing corporate loopholes, saying that he would fight for that approach as the Congressional commission considers what to recommend to Congress for an up-or-down vote before the end of the year, as the new law requires.