New York Times
By Michael Shear and Jonathan Weisman
September 4, 2013
The intensifying debate over military action in Syria is threatening to consume the limited amount of time that Congress had allocated this month for dealing with a budget clash and the rest of President Obama’s domestic agenda.
Lawmakers are scheduled to return to reconvene Congress on Monday after their annual summer break. With a budget and debt limit clash looming in October, the legislative window had already narrowed for any action on immigration, energy efficiency, a new Federal Reserve chairman and an examination of surveillance laws.
Now, with Mr. Obama’s surprise decision to request Congressional authorization for a Syria strike, the political casualties are mounting quickly.
“This is drawing the national attention to a foreign policy issue and taking it off of domestic issues like immigration reform and health care implementation,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.
She said some lawmakers might use the debate as an excuse to avoid action, adding, “I do think people come up with reasons not to do their job.”
Congressional leaders in both parties have said they are eager to move quickly on a Syria vote, and the House and Senate began hearings this week. But it remains unclear how long the Syria debate will take. White House officials said they expected the debate to drag out at least into the third week of September.
That would scramble the calendar that House and Senate leaders had anticipated when they left the Capitol for vacations earlier this summer. The problem is especially striking in the House, which will barely be in session this month. The Senate is scheduled to work for five straight weeks after a vote Monday night to force senators to return to Washington. The House will be taking nine workdays off during that stretch.
More than anything, the war question is likely to siphon attention away from efforts to resolve a simmering fiscal dispute between the parties. Without a Congressional agreement by Sept. 30, the government will run out of money on Oct. 1. Two weeks later, the government’s statutory borrowing limit must be raised to avoid a potentially catastrophic debt default.
Washington has been bracing for a fiscal clash for months. Some Republicans in the House have said they are prepared to shut the government down if Congress will not agree to remove money for the carrying out of Mr. Obama’s health care law. Other Republicans have said they do not intend to raise the nation’s debt limit unless the president agrees to more spending cuts.
Mr. Obama has said he will not negotiate over the nation’s ability to pay its bills, and has warned Republicans that shutting down the government would be a reckless move. The Syria debate means both sides have less free time to work toward a negotiated settlement on the issues.
Kevin Smith, a spokesman for the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, played down any impact on the fall’s most important matters.
“We are confident we can address a resolution on use of force in Syria and still meet our obligations in a fiscally responsible manner,” he said.
But Congressional aides in both parties said the Syria debate was already causing disruptions.
Mr. Boehner had promised he would bring a bill to finance transportation and housing programs to the floor in September after an ugly defeat in July. That will not happen.
The House Judiciary Committee had hoped to begin moving piecemeal immigration legislation, but the bills’ prospects for House action this fall were already slim before the Syria crisis. Now they will probably slip beyond Thanksgiving.
Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees had also intended to move significant changes to laws governing the National Security Agency’s phone and Internet surveillance programs — either through stand-alone legislation or a reauthorization of existing intelligence law. That, too, is likely to slip.
A Senate Democratic leadership aide said the debate and vote on the war resolution would consume the first week back, putting off a fight over judicial nominations for the foreseeable future. But leaders still expect to turn to a bipartisan energy efficiency bill the week of Sept. 16, as scheduled.
White House officials said Congress shouldered the responsibility to get its work done despite the new burden of a vote on military action in Syria.
“An American president has to be able to walk, chew gum and juggle at the same time,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “The president and his team will do everything they can to implement his overall agenda while this debate happens.”
Mr. Pfeiffer added, “This is an important debate, and it’s one the president, the country and the Congress are rightly focused on.”
Mr. Pfeiffer said the White House would continue to press ahead with Mr. Obama’s agenda. Former President Bill Clinton delivered a speech on Wednesday as part of the administration’s effort to get people to sign up for health care beginning on Oct. 1. That effort will continue, Mr. Pfeiffer said.
But other issues may languish, at least for a while.
Aides say some will now slip beyond Thanksgiving, including the annual defense policy bill and a possible fix to the Voting Rights Act in response to a Supreme Court ruling that struck down a key provision of the historic law.
Advocates of a comprehensive immigration overhaul had hoped to build some momentum in the House this month toward passage of legislation similar to a bill that passed the Senate this year with Mr. Obama’s backing.
That already faced long odds in the House, where many Republicans oppose any effort to offer citizenship to most of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants. Now, with the Syria debate in Washington, aides said any serious effort on immigration in the House was likely to be pushed back to November or even later.
“There’s no question that the debate on Syria is going to take precedence now,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a group lobbying for an immigration overhaul. But he said that he was less concerned about the timeline for action than he was the need to build consensus around a solution.
“This is less about whether there’s time,” he said. “It’s more about whether there’s a will.”
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