Obama Wins on Budget Deal as John Boehner Cleans Out the Barn

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS


The budget agreement struck late Monday between the White House and Congress hands President Obama a clear victory, vindicating his hard line this year against spending limits that he argued were a drag on the economy and buying him freedom for the final 14 months of his term from the fiscal dysfunction that has plagued his presidency.

The deal is the policy equivalent of keeping the lights on — hardly the stuff of a bold fiscal legacy. But it achieves the main objective of his 2016 budget: to break free of the spending shackles he agreed to when he signed the Budget Control Act of 2011, an outcome, the president allowed Tuesday, that he could be “pretty happy” about.

For this fiscal year alone, the deal would add $50 billion in spending, divided equally between defense and domestic programs, as well as $16 billion for emergency war spending, half for the military, half for the State Department. Together, that represents an increase of $66 billion above the spending limits for 2016, not far off the $70 billion increase Mr. Obama requested.

From the moment he introduced his budget on Feb. 2, Mr. Obama held firm on his demand that Congress break through the punishing across-the-board cuts known as sequestration in the Budget Control Act to provide equal increases to domestic and military spending. He promised to veto any spending bill that adhered to the statutory spending caps, made good on that threat this month by vetoing a popular defense policy bill, enlisted the support of congressional Democrats with whom his White House had sometimes sparred on budget matters, and capitalized on Republican divisions to get his way.

Senate Democrats created an impenetrable wall for Republicans determined to stick to the caps, filibustering the spending bills that reached the Senate floor and threatening to block the ones that did not. House Democrats stayed in lock step with Mr. Obama as well, with Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, promising that her troops would sustain the president’s veto.

The result was a deal that would raise spending $80 billion, or about 1 percent, over the next two years while enacting an array of cuts that Democrats found palatable. The deal also would suspend the statutory debt limit — on track to be breached on Tuesday without action from Congress — until March 2017, beyond his presidency. It also contains a provision Ms. Pelosi had pressed for to avert large Medicare premium increases for some beneficiaries.

“This shouldn’t be mistaken for some overarching grand bargain, but there’s a lot in here the White House likes and not much they don’t,” said Jared Bernstein, a former top economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research institute in Washington. “Most importantly, if the deal prevails, they won’t have to deal with budget nonsense for the rest of the term, which has got to look pretty sweet.”

The near-midnight posting of a 144-page agreement suggested that lawmakers were cognizant of looming political and operational deadlines. Even the caustic reaction of Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican on track to be elected speaker of the House on Thursday, did not dampen White House hopes, since Mr. Obama’s team recognized any agreement it could accept would defy the demands of the hard-line conservatives in the House whose backing Mr. Ryan depends on.

His opposition seemed orchestrated more to keep his election as speaker on track than to derail a budget deal that mirrors one he personally negotiated with Senate Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, in 2013. In the end, the retirement of Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, Mr. Obama’s negotiating partner in several abortive attempts at a much more sweeping fiscal deal, handed the president the leverage he needed to break the budget impasse. Mr. Boehner said he wanted to “clean out the barn” before handing over his gavel to a successor, telegraphing an opening for an agreement.

The president, hammered by some in his party for staying on the sidelines in earlier budget battles, quietly deployed Katie Beirne Fallon and Brian Deese, two senior officials with deep knowledge of Capitol Hill and the budget, to hammer out details with aides to Mr. Boehner; Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader; Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader; and Ms. Pelosi. “The Boehner resignation clearly was a pivot point, and his clear statement of wanting to clean out the barn was a real signal to the administration that there was a chance here,” said G. William Hoagland, a former senior Republican Senate budget aide. “The president learned a lot from his previous experiences on this, that if you’re trying to govern, you don’t run a political campaign. You have to work quietly and hard behind the scenes.” Mr. Obama, who disdains such legislative wrangling, ultimately had to yield to it.

And the deal did not come without concessions from the White House; it included Social Security cuts that Democrats have resisted, omitted tax increases the president had insisted must be part of any fair budget, and employed the very budgeting trick Mr. Obama dismissed as a gimmick in vetoing the defense measure to boost spending levels.

The White House said Mr. Obama had been “heavily engaged” in the talks behind the scenes since mid-September — a marked change from two years ago, when the president sat on the sidelines as Mr. Ryan and Ms. Murray negotiated the last increase in the spending limits. This time, the president occasionally made his presence known over the phone. What he got in return was an agreement that top White House officials said would create jobs and promote growth — and that Democrats hope will position them for electoral success in 2016. “As our strong domestic economic momentum continues to face headwinds from slowing growth abroad, it is critical to avoid the self-inflicted wounds of past episodes of fiscal brinkmanship,” Jason Furman, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in a blog post on Tuesday. “Instead, this agreement strengthens both short- and long-run growth, setting the stage for more, higher-paid jobs.”

Whether or not that happens, Mr. Obama can now see the end of lurching from spending crisis to spending crisis.

“There’s a lot that he’d like to do for the rest of his term, and that doesn’t include worrying about shutdowns and debt ceilings and spending hours strategizing and squabbling like crazy with the other side,” Mr. Bernstein said. “The idea that he can now work on policy he wants to promote, particularly around the economy, education, infrastructure — that’s got to feel great.”