The bill, which passed 74 to 26, was immediately signed by President Obama, who took a final shot at his Republican opposition for what he called a manufactured ? and avoidable ? crisis. ?Voters may have chosen divided government,? he said, ?but they sure didn?t vote for dysfunctional government.?
Voters will render their verdicts on the merits of divided government next year, but its impact is now abundantly clear: the agenda of the 112th Congress will be dominated by continuous fighting over spending priorities and regulation, with a high bar for big debates on foreign policy and other domestic issues coming to the fore.
?When was the last time anybody said anything about Libya?? said Representative Phil Gingrey, a Republican from Georgia who was first elected in 2002. ?This is the way it is going to be until the election.?
In the seven months since the change of power in the House, the Washington discourse has shifted almost completely from the decades-long battle between both parties over how to allocate government resources to jousting over the moral high ground on imposing austerity, with seemingly none of the political or practical motivations that have historically driven legislation.
Republicans, though controlling only one-third of the process through their majority in the House, appear to have firmly snagged the upper hand in the legislative dynamics, largely because of their unwillingness to sacrifice ground even when their stance threatens both the government?s ability to operate and pay its debts, and their own prospects for retaining their jobs.
?The difference is the intensity here,? said David R. Mayhew, a political science professor at Yale. ?The Republicans have the Tea Party, and the Democrats don?t have anything of comparable animation on their side.?
Democrats, hamstrung in part by Congressional procedures and hewing to more traditional methods of compromise and negotiation, allowed Republicans to pull the center of debate much closer to their priorities.
?We could draw parallels and distinctions with other tumultuous times such as the Civil War,? Glen Browder, a former congressman from Alabama and professor emeritus at Jacksonville State University, said in an e-mail. ?But I do believe that this is something different from most Democrat-Republican struggles in our recent history. The traditional game of politics in which the two sides contest over control of issues and decisions for core constituencies has erupted into an intense struggle with critical ideological/philosophical divisions about what America means and how America ought to work.?
The compromise over the debt ceiling, which the House passed on Monday, has been denounced by Democrats as being tilted too heavily toward Republican priorities, mainly because it does not raise any new revenues as it reduces budget deficits by at least $2.1 trillion in the next 10 years. But it attracted the votes of many Democrats, if only because the many months of standoff had brought the country perilously close to default.
On Tuesday evening, Moody?s Investors Service appeared to echo the mixed feelings in Congress about the deal, saying it was not going to immediately lower the government?s AAA credit rating but also officially signaled that it was prepared to downgrade it unless more is done to deal with the deficit.
The wrangling in Congress also laid bare divisions within both parties, with the final passage in the Senate relying on the votes of the remaining center of each party ? 28 Republicans, 45 Democrats and one independent voted aye ? with the most right- and left-leaning members left ultimately on the sidelines.
In the Senate, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Mike Lee of Utah, both Republican freshmen blessed by the Tea Party, voted against the bill, mirroring their counterparts in the House, including a third of that chamber?s freshmen.
On the left, six Democrats and one independent rejected the bill, arguing that it placed too much burden on middle- and lower-income Americans. Among the Democrats who opposed the measures were reliable liberals like Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, but also Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who voted in contrast to the senior member from her state, Senator Charles E. Schumer.