Heritage Action: Thumbs down to Boehner and Reid plans

A key conservative group announced Tuesday that it would score votes on two deficit plans it opposes, one from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the other from House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Heritage Action placed most of the blame for the current impasse over the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling on President Obama and Senate Democrats, saying the House GOP’s 2012 budget and the recent “cut, cap and balance” plan met the country’s serious fiscal challenges.

But, as it hinted on Monday, the group also believes that the latest proposal from Boehner isn’t up to snuff, either, calling it “regrettably insufficient.”

"The entire purpose of the debt limit is to put an end to borrowing when it reaches a point that our nation finds unacceptable," Michael Needham, the group’s chief executive, wrote in a Tuesday letter to lawmakers. “There is no point in having a debt limit if the option of using it to address overspending and overborrowing is so intimidating that it is unilaterally taken off the table.”

With the Aug. 2 debt-limit deadline just days away, both Boehner and Reid’s plans could get high-stakes votes this week. 

Boehner’s latest proposal would pair a roughly $1 trillion increase in the limit with $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, as well as forming a commission to find more deficit reduction.

On the other side of the Capitol, Reid’s $2.7 trillion plan would allow for the debt ceiling to be raised through next year’s election — which Democrats say is necessary to comfort financial markets. Reduced interest payments and savings from troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan account for a sizable amount of the proposal's savings.

For its part, Heritage Action, in response to Boehner’s plan, said it saw no reason to believe yet another debt panel would succeed where others have hit the wall, and that it did not rein in deficits enough.

The conservative group called the Reid framework “equally unacceptable,” lumping it in with other “insufficiently bold ideas” like the Gang of Six plan that have come out of the Senate.