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| "Não há vencedores no fim destas duas semanas de braço-de-ferro, que quase arrastou a economia norte-americana para o default, mas há um claro derrotado: o Tea Party, cujos membros no Senado e na Câmara de Representantes forçaram a suspensão parcial da actividade do Governo federal, numa "revolta" contra o chamado "Obamacare", o programa que obriga à cobertura de cuidados de saúde através da subscrição de um seguro e que foi a grande conquista legislativa do primeiro mandato do Presidente." |
Republicanos cedem e marcam novo duelo para Dezembro
Acordo de última hora no Congresso salvou a América do precipício orçamental e abriu a porta à reactivação dos serviços públicos, suspensos desde o início de Outubro
O suspense prolongou-se até ao fim do dia, mas ao
cair do pano o Congresso dos Estados Unidos aprovou uma lei orçamental para
reactivar o Governo federal e aumentar o limite do endividamento público, que o
Presidente Barack Obama ia assinar mesmo a tempo de evitar que o país caísse no
precipício orçamental arrastando com ele a economia mundial.
A lei cabimenta as verbas necessárias para o funcionamento até 15 de Janeiro
dos serviços públicos garantidos pelas agências e departamentos federais - que
foi suspenso no início de Outubro por não ter sido aprovado um orçamento - e
autoriza o Governo a financiar-se nos mercados até bater num novo tecto para a
dívida pública, o que segundo as projecções deverá acontecer a 7 de Fevereiro de
2014. Crucialmente, a proposta prevê que o Tesouro recorra a "medidas
extraordinárias" para impedir um default, se esse risco voltar a
ocorrer.Também obriga os legisladores das duas câmaras do Congresso a constituir um "supercomité", que terá até Dezembro para delinear um acordo orçamental duradouro, isto é, um documento definitivo que consagre o objectivo de um "grande negócio" para a redução do défice, com medidas no lado das receitas (subidas de impostos reclamadas pelos democratas) e das despesas (cortes de programas exigidos pelos republicanos).
Essa grand bargain (no jargão em inglês) difícil de obter foi tentada e rejeitada no final de 2011, num anterior confronto entre os dois partidos que deixou o Orçamento sob "sequestro". Em troca da aprovação das contas públicas e da negociação do tecto da dívida, a maioria republicana do Congresso forçou a Casa Branca a aceitar o congelamento das despesas discricionárias do Governo e cortes automáticos em programas que contribuem para o défice.
"O país esteve à beira do precipício e agradeço ao líder dos republicanos o seu esforço para alcançarmos este compromisso e pormos um fim ao impasse que mantinha Washington paralisado desde o início do Outono", sublinhou o líder da maioria democrata no Senado, Harry Reid, referindo-se ao senador Mitch McConnell. "Este era o acordo necessário para responder aos desafios do dia de hoje", retorquiu o republicano, admitindo que a solução negociada "não vai tão longe quanto alguns desejavam, mas reabre o Governo, evita o default e protege os cortes que conquistámos na lei para controlar o Orçamento", enumerou.
"O Presidente aplaude os líderes Reid e McConnell pelo seu trabalho conjunto que levou à assinatura deste compromisso, e apela à acção imediata do Congresso para acabar com o shutdown e proteger o crédito dos Estados Unidos", reagiu o porta-voz da Casa Branca, Jay Carney, assim que o acordo foi anunciado.
A equipa de Obama evitou deliberadamente declarações triunfalistas. O Presidente sabe que este é um "alívio" temporário e que um novo duelo é sempre possível em Dezembro, quando os partidos voltarem a negociar um projecto orçamental. Mas os custos políticos do actual combate poderão levar os diversos intervenientes do processo legislativo a rever a sua estratégia.
Não há vencedores no fim destas duas semanas de braço-de-ferro, que quase arrastou a economia norte-americana para o default, mas há um claro derrotado: o Tea Party, cujos membros no Senado e na Câmara de Representantes forçaram a suspensão parcial da actividade do Governo federal, numa "revolta" contra o chamado "Obamacare", o programa que obriga à cobertura de cuidados de saúde através da subscrição de um seguro e que foi a grande conquista legislativa do primeiro mandato do Presidente.
Apesar da oposição do senador do Texas Ted Cruz e dos 50 congressistas do Tea Party, o projecto de lei que ontem foi aprovado mantém o programa intacto - o Presidente e os democratas deixaram claro desde o início que não aceitariam fazer concessões às exigências dos republicanos, acusados de fazer chantagem com o Obamacare. A única "cedência" foi a introdução de uma cláusula antifraude, que obrigará à confirmação de rendimentos para a concessão de subsídios à compra de apólices.
Numa entrevista ontem à Fox News, o director da Heritage Action, a organização que apoiou a luta do Tea Party contra o Obamacare, reconheceu que o shutdown do Governo acabou por se revelar uma estratégia errada. "Ficou claro para toda a gente que não vamos conseguir revogar esta lei antes de 2017, e para isso vamos ter de ganhar o Senado e ganhar a Casa Branca", considerou Michael Needham.
Ontem ainda era cedo para perceber se as perspectivas eleitorais dos republicanos, a um ano da votação para a recomposição do Congresso, ficaram comprometidas. Mas era claro que a batalha deixou cicatrizes: nas sondagens realizadas durante as duas semanas de paralisação do Governo, os conservadores sobressaíram como os principais culpados pelo impasse no Congresso. A taxa de aprovação dos congressistas republicanos está no nível mais baixo de sempre, com apenas 21% da opinião pública agradada com a sua acção - e dois em cada três americanos a desaprovarem o seu desempenho (segundo os números da ABC-Washington Post).
E se à última hora os líderes republicanos do Senado e da Câmara de Representantes lograram impedir a catástrofe financeira e económica que se anunciava, se os EUA entrassem em incumprimento nos mercados, não conseguiram silenciar a oposição interna e acabar com a indisciplina no seio da bancada conservadora, onde a fractura ideológica entre a facção "convencional" do partido e os membros do Tea Party se tornou evidente.
Num editorial da National Review, Jonah Goldberg argumentava que a luta contra o Obamacare estava perdida e que o melhor que os republicanos tinham a fazer era admitir a derrota e seguir em frente - unidos e não divididos. Pelo seu lado, Erick Erickson, o director do Red State, outro influente site conservador, apelou a uma nova "insurreição" contra os republicanos que atiraram a toalha ao chão e desistiram da luta.
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Speaker John A. Boehner returned to the Capitol on Wednesday
night.
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Republicans Back Down, Ending Budget Crisis
By JONATHAN WEISMAN and ASHLEY PARKER
Published: October 16, 2013/ New York Times /
WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans conceded defeat on
Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health
care law as the House and Senate approved last-minute legislation ending a
disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extending federal borrowing power to
avert a financial default with potentially worldwide economic repercussions.
With the Treasury Department warning that it could run out
of money to pay national obligations within a day, the Senate voted
overwhelmingly on Wednesday evening, 81 to 18, to approve a proposal hammered
out by the chamber’s Republican and Democratic leaders after the House on
Tuesday was unable to move forward with any resolution. The House followed suit
a few hours later, voting 285 to 144 to approve the Senate plan, which would
fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7.
Mr. Obama signed the bill about 12:30 a.m. Thursday.
Most House Republicans opposed the bill, but 87 voted to support
it. The breakdown showed that Republican leaders were willing to violate their
informal rule against advancing bills that do not have majority Republican
support in order to end the shutdown. All 198 Democrats voting supported the
measure.
Mr. Obama, speaking shortly after the Senate vote, praised
Congress, but he said he hoped the damaging standoff would not be repeated.
“We’ve got to get out of the habit of governing by crisis,”
said Mr. Obama, who urged Congress to proceed not only with new budget
negotiations, but with immigration changes and a farm bill as well. “We could
get all these things done even this year, if everybody comes together in a
spirit of, how are we going to move this country forward and put the last three
weeks behind us?”
After the House vote, officials announced that the federal
government would reopen on Thursday and that federal employees should return to
work.
The result of the impasse that threatened the nation’s
credit rating was a near total defeat for Republican conservatives, who had
engineered the budget impasse as a way to strip the new health care law of
funding even as registration for benefits opened Oct. 1 or, failing that, to
win delays in putting the program into place.
The shutdown sent Republican poll ratings plunging, cost the
government billions of dollars and damaged the nation’s international
credibility. Mr. Obama refused to compromise, leaving Republican leaders to beg
him to talk, and to fulminate when he refused. For all that, Republicans got a slight
tightening of income verification rules for Americans accessing new health
insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act.
“We fought the good fight,” said Speaker John A. Boehner of
Ohio, who has struggled to control the conservative faction in the House, in an
interview with a Cincinnati radio station. “We just didn’t win.”
In a brief closed session with his Republican rank and file,
Mr. Boehner told members to hold their heads high, go home, get some rest and
think about how they could work better as a team.
Two weeks of relative cohesion broke down into near chaos on
Tuesday when Republican leaders failed twice to unite their troops behind a
last-gasp effort to prevent a default on their own terms. By Wednesday, House
conservatives were accusing more moderate Republicans of undercutting their
position. Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a leading Republican
voice for ending the fight, said Congress should have passed a bill to fund the
government without policy strings attached weeks ago.
“That’s essentially what we’re doing now,” Mr. Dent said.
“People can blame me all they want, but I was correct in my analysis and I’d
say a lot of those folks were not correct in theirs.”
Under the agreement to reopen the government, the House and
Senate are directed to hold talks and reach accord by Dec. 13 on a long-term
blueprint for tax and spending policies over the next decade. Mr. Obama said
consistently through the standoff that he was willing to have a wide-ranging
budget negotiation once the government was reopened and the debt limit raised.
Mr. Boehner and his leadership team had long felt that they
needed to allow their restive conference to pitch a battle over the president’s
health care law, a fight that had been brewing almost since the law was passed
in 2010. Now, they hope the fever has broken, and they can negotiate on issues
where they think they have the upper hand, like spending cuts and changes to
entitlement programs.
But there were no guarantees that Congress would not be at
loggerheads again by mid-January, and there is deep skepticism in both parties
that Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Patty Murray of
Washington, who will lead the budget negotiations, can bridge the chasm between
them.
“This moves us into the next phase of the same debate,” said
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat. “Our hope
is now that Speaker Boehner and his caucus have played out their scenario with
a tragic outcome, perhaps they’ll be willing to be more constructive.”
As Republican lawmakers left the closed meeting Wednesday,
some were already thinking of the next fight.
“I’ll vote against it,” said Representative John C. Fleming,
Republican of Louisiana, referring to the Senate plan. “But that will get us
into Round 2. See, we’re going to start this all over again.”
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader
who was instrumental in ending the crisis, stressed that under the deal he had
negotiated with the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the
across-the-board budget cuts extracted in the 2011 fiscal showdown remained in
place over the objections of some Democrats, a slim reed that not even he
claimed as a significant victory.
The deal, Mr. McConnell said, “is far less than many of us
hoped for, quite frankly, but it’s far better than what some had sought.”
“Now it’s time for Republicans to unite behind other crucial
goals,” he added.
Chastened Senate Republicans said they hoped the outcome
would be a learning experience for the lawmakers in the House and the Senate
who shut down the government in hopes of gutting the health law, Mr. Obama’s
signature domestic achievement. Instead of using the twin issues of government
funding and borrowing authority to address the drivers of the federal deficit,
conservatives focused on a law they could never undo as long as Mr. Obama is
president, several lawmakers said.
“Goose egg, nothing, we got nothing,” said Representative
Thomas H. Massie, Republican of Kentucky.
Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina took a swipe at his
fellow Republican senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, as well as
House members who linked government financing to defunding the health care law,
which is financed by its own designated revenues and spending cuts.
“Let’s just say sometimes learning what can’t be
accomplished is an important long-term thing,” Mr. Burr said, “and hopefully
for some of the members they’ve learned it’s impossible to defund mandatory
programs by shutting down the federal government.”
While Mr. Cruz conceded defeat, he did not express
contrition.
“Unfortunately, the Washington establishment is failing to
listen to the American people,” he said as he emerged from a meeting of Senate
Republicans called to ratify the agreement.
For hundreds of thousands of federal workers across the
country furloughed from their jobs, the legislative deal meant an abrupt end to
their forced vacation as the government comes back to life beginning Thursday.
In a statement late Wednesday, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the
director of the Office of Management and Budget, made the reopening official.
“Employees should expect to return to work in the morning,”
she said, adding they should check news reports and the Office of Personnel
Management’s Web site for updates.
For Mr. Boehner, who had failed to unite his conference
around a workable plan, Wednesday’s decision to take up the Senate bill proved
surprisingly free of conflict. Hard-line Republican lawmakers largely rallied
around the speaker.
Representative Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho, said he was
“really proud” of how Mr. Boehner had handled the situation. “I’m more upset
with my Republican conference, to be honest with you,” he said.
Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.
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