In yet another eleventh-hour act, the United States has averted a catastrophic debt default and ended the partial Government shutdown as House Republicans finally backed down in the face of mounting public pressure and an unyielding President Obama administration.
As in August 2011, the bitterly-divided US Congress took the crisis to the very brink, with the Senate and the House of Representatives approving back-to-back a deal just in the nick of time ahead of Wednesday’s midnight deadline. President Barack Obama signed the measure half-an-hour after midnight.
But the bipartisan deal has an in-built recipe for another face-off in three to four months, since it funds the government only up to January 15 and extends the debt limit till February 7. The Republicans could exert renewed pressure, if there is no progress on a host of budget-related issues by that time.
For now, however, the Democrats are in a celebratory mood even as the Republicans, riven by divisions over strategy, are clearly down in the dumps.
President Obama himself said there are no winners in what has been a self-inflicted crisis that has only set the American economy back. “American people are completely fed up with Washington,” he remarked, urging Congress to act speedily on other major pending issues, notably comprehensive immigration reform.
As the federal Government reopened on Thursday after 16 days of partial shutdown, rating agency Standard & Poors came up with a grim estimate that the shutdown had cost the US economy some $24 billion.
Republican Speaker John Boehner, for his part, conceded defeat. “We’ve been locked in a fight over here, trying to bring Government down to size and do our best to stop Obamacare,” he said in a radio interview, adding: “We fought the good fight. We just didn’t win.”