The House speaker will announce a plan on taxes. | JAY WESTCOTT/POLITICO Boehner's hard line on debt cap

Speaker John Boehner is once again promising that any increase in the nation’s borrowing limit will have to be accompanied by a greater amount of spending cuts.

The Ohio Republican’s position, which will be announced at the Peter G. Peterson Fiscal Summit Tuesday in D.C., seems to mirror his stance during last year’s all-consuming debt ceiling standoff.


“When the time comes, I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase,” Boehner plans to say, according to excerpts released by his office. “This is the only avenue I see right now to force the elected leadership of this country to solve our structural fiscal imbalance. If that means we have to do a series of stop-gap measures, so be it – but that’s not the ideal. Let’s start solving the problem. We can make the bold cuts and reforms necessary to meet this principle, and we must.”

Boehner will also announce a plan on taxes. During the fall, the House will vote on a bill to extend the current, lower income tax rates. But the legislation will also “establish an expedited process by which Congress would enact real tax reform in 2013.

“The Ways & Means Committee will work out the details, but the bottom line is: if we do this right, this will be the last time we ever have to confront the uncertainty of expiring tax rates,” Boehner is slated to say, according to excerpts of the speech. “We’ll have replaced the broken status quo with a tax code that maintains progressivity, taxes income once, and creates a fairer, simpler code.”

It’s the first time Boehner has publicly addressed his plan to deal with the expiring Bush tax rates.

Earlier at the summit, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was asked about Boehner’s vow. Geithner warned against risking the country’s credit worthiness to serve a “political agenda.”

“This commitment to meet the obligations of the nation — this commitment to protect the credit worthiness of the country is a fundamental commitment,” Geithner told moderator David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal. “It’s the foundation for any market economy … It allows us to govern, to fight wars, to deal with crises, with recessions, to adjust to a changing world.”

He added, “You can’t put that into question, you can’t put it into doubt. You can’t … threaten to undermine that in the service of the partisan political agenda.”

Noting that only Congress can act to raise the debt limit, the treasury secretary noted he hoped lawmakers would take action this time “without the drama and the pain and the damage they caused the country last July.”

A leading Democrat seemed cool to the proposal. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the No. 2 House Democrat, said Boehner’s insistence to offset the debt ceiling hike resulted in the steep across-the-board automatic spending cuts, which “none of us like.”

And, speaking at the summit soon after excerpts of Boehner’s remarks went public, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) accused the House speaker of making a “reckless” threat.

“They’re going to insist penny for penny on cutting the budget in exchange for an increase in the debt ceiling,” the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, said. “[A]s an economic and fiscal matter, it is absolutely reckless to threaten that the United States will not pay its bills. … That is not fiscal discipline. That is fiscal irresponsibility.”

Van Hollen also argued that if the House Republican budget plan were to be adopted today, the debt ceiling would have to be increased by some $5.2 trillion dollars over the next ten years.

“So their own budget would not meet the standards that are laid down by the speaker,” he said.

Raising the debt ceiling will present a different challenge this time around. It could be one of a number of things Congress has to do at the end of the year. For example, all income tax brackets expire, as does the payroll tax holiday and government funding.

Many conservatives in the House Republican Conference have said that they wish the party fought harder last year on the debt ceiling. It remains to be seen whether that sentiment will linger.