Biden meets with House, Senate leaders
WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden will meet today with the Senate and House Democratic caucuses while Republican leaders also huddle to gauge support for the debt-ceiling plan negotiators agreed to Sunday.
The legislative path for the bill was still somewhat unclear as individual members study the details. No votes had been scheduled yet in either the House or Senate today, but could be added once party leadership talk with their respective caucuses.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told members Sunday night that the bill would move quickly to the floor, perhaps as early as this afternoon.
The proposed deal would raise the debt ceiling to carry the government into 2013, while providing for at least a dollar-per-dollar exchange of spending cuts. The spending cuts would come in two stages.
An initial round would impose more than $900 billion in domestic cuts across the federal government over the next 10 years. But the vast majority of those cuts would fall in future years.
A new congressional committee will be formed with equal members from both parties, which would by late November recommend $1.5 trillion in further cuts. Unless those are adopted, $1.2 trillion in additional cuts would automatically be triggered in 2013.