The debt ceiling vote could come to a vote as soon as Friday, but House Republicans did not intend to re-open the government - Well, Pres Obama has repeatedly said he will not negotiate until the gov't is re-opened...we're about to see if Obama means what he says.
Congressional Republicans rush to develop plan to reopen government, avoid default
.. i read somewhere the "2.3-percent tax on medical devices' has been labeled non-core ..
Video: Amid signs of movement, White House spokesman Jay Carney says he doesn't know "if and when the House is going to act" to end the government shutdown.
By Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane, Updated: Saturday, October 12, 11:35 AM
Congressional Republicans rushed late Friday to develop a new plan for reopening the government and avoiding a first-ever default in hopes of crafting a strategy that can win the support of the White House before financial markets open Monday.
Talks on Capitol Hill advanced with a new urgency after President Obama rejected House Speaker John A. Boehner’s (R) offer to raise the debt limit through late November to give the parties time to negotiate a broader budget deal.
Briefing reporters after financial markets closed for the week, White House press secretary Jay Carney praised a “new willingness” among Republicans to end the government shutdown — now in its 12th day .. http://tiny.cc/s4ot4w .. — and to acknowledge that default on the national debt “would be catastrophically damaging.”
But with the Treasury Department due to exhaust its borrowing authority in just six days, Carney said the president would not agree to go through another round of economy-rattling talks in six weeks, just before the Christmas shopping season.
“It at least looks as if there’s a possibility of making some progress here,” Carney said. But, “we have to remove these demands for leverage essentially using the American people and the American economy.”
Before Carney spoke, Obama telephoned Boehner and the two men agreed to keep talking, aides said. Afterward, GOP senators marched into Boehner’s office and counseled him to adopt an approach they had presented to Obama earlier in the day, during their own meeting at the White House.
With Republicans getting battered in public opinion polls over the shutdown, Senate GOP leaders urged Boehner to join them in supporting a single, big-bang measure that would open the government and raise the debt limit in one fell swoop.
“I laid out some of those ideas, and the question is, can the House find a center of gravity to open the government up around those ideas,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said after exiting the speaker’s office with Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). The two men, former House members, have been close friends with Boehner for almost 20 years.
Details were still fluid late Friday, but the latest 23-page draft of the emerging measure would immediately end the shutdown and fund federal agencies for six months at current spending levels. It would maintain deep automatic cuts known as the sequester, but give agency officials flexibility to decide where the cuts should fall.
In addition, the proposal would also raise the debt limit through Jan. 31, 2014. Lawmakers were considering whether to include a provision that would direct the House and Senate Budget committees to immediately enter negotiations over broader budget issues and to issue a report by Jan. 15, 2014. If an agreement could be reached, it would clear a path for another increase in the debt limit later that month, without additional drama.
In exchange, Republicans were seeking what they called a few “fig leafs” — minor adjustments to Obama’s new health-care initiative. The first would delay for two years a 2.3-percent tax on medical devices that is unpopular in both parties. The second would require internal auditors to ensure that people who get tax subsidies to buy health insurance are in fact eligible.
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Another option under consideration but not included in the latest draft would reduce the number of workers required to receive health coverage from an employer, by changing the definition of a full-time worker from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week.
In an interview with a Kentucky newspaper Friday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) signaled that he was helping to shepherd the effort to reach a compromise with Democrats. Where U.S. is feeling the shutdown
“We’re in one of those situations right now where it’s going to require some sort of coming together here to get past the current impasse. And I’m going to continue to work on that,” McConnell told the Herald-Leader of Lexington.
By late Friday, talks over the measure were proceeding on multiple tracks. In the Senate, negotiations had advanced far enough that Senate Republicans — led by Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — sent draft language to their Democratic counterparts, including Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a trusted ally of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
Meanwhile, Boehner was huddled with his top lieutenants in a hideaway on the first floor of the Capitol, reviewing his options over Chinese carryout and cigarettes.
The Senate proposal differs in critical ways from the approach Boehner sold earlier this week to his rank and file, who had insisted on using the threat of the shutdown to try to undermine the Affordable Care Act.
Given those demands, Boehner had offered to lift the debt limit for six weeks to clear space for negotiations over overhauling the tax code, trimming federal entitlement spending and reforming the health care law. The government would remain shuttered unless Obama agreed to those talks.
House Republicans also proposed to roll back a portion of the sequester cuts, a top Democratic priority. But those cuts would have to be replaced with equal reductions to Medicare spending, such as Obama’s proposal to make well-off seniors pay more for coverage.
It was unclear how long the House offer would have kept the government open without further negotiations. But House Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers (R-Ky.) quickly blasted the Senate plan to extend temporary funding for six months, calling it “disastrous.”
“It is a punt to the executive branch for the Congress not to exercise judgement about where money is spent,” Rogers said in a statement.
Boehner has scheduled a meeting of the entire GOP conference for 9 a.m. Saturday, but it was unclear whether he would present details of the proposal emerging in the Senate. Senate Republicans were hopeful that Boehner could build support for the plan and push it through the House first.
That could not only help get it to Obama’s desk faster, but also preserve Boehner’s political standing by avoiding a repeat of the New Year’s Day deal over the so-called “fiscal cliff.”
Then, a Senate-passed measure to stop scheduled tax hikes for the vast majority of Americans won the support of only 85 Republicans in the House. More than 150 GOP lawmakers opposed the bill, including some of Boehner’s top deputies, and the humiliating loss emboldened conservatives to vote against his re-election as speaker.
Senate Republicans cautioned, however, that Boehner doesn’t have much time to work things out. GOP senators are eager not only to get the government back to work but to raise the $16.7 trillion debt limit before Thursday, when the Treasury Department has said it would exhaust its ability to conserve cash. Without an increase in the debt limit, independent analysts say the Treasury would begin missing payments by Nov. 1.
GOP senators and aides said Boehner has been told that Senate Republicans will negotiate their own pact with Senate Democrats if he fails to act.
“From my point of view, it’d be better for the country if the House led,” Graham said. “It’s important that we continue to talk among ourselves as senators,” he added, but “if it came out of the House, it would be better.”
Even as negotiations progressed rapidly in the Senate, the uncertainty over procedure cast a shadow of doubt over their ultimate success.
“It’s encouraging to me that the president is now negotiating with both the House and the Senate, after saying that he wouldn’t,” Collins said. “But it is very uncertain to me what the outcome is going to be.”
Staff writers Philip Rucker and Rosalind Helderman contributed to this report.
Republicans with a death-wish are holding US to ransom
With the American government stuck in its second full week of a congressional-compelled shutdown, popular pressure is making even hyper-partisans sweat on Capitol Hill
Democrats wait in line to file onto the House floor to sign a petition to reopen the federal government in the US Capitol in Washington DC, Photo: JIM LO SCALZO/EPA
By John Avlon 5:48PM BST 12 Oct 2013
After 12 days of stalemate, conversations – if not negotiations – have started.
But House Republicans remain deadlocked with the White House, its leadership constrained by their own far-Right-wing caucus, announcing to members in a closed-door session this morning that any deal would have to come from the Senate, where Mitch McConnell, the GOP minority leader, declared: “I’m willing to work with the government we have, not the one I wish we had.” This is a significant concession to reality.
Washington is engaged in a war of attrition – not just between Republicans and Democrats, but an increasingly vicious civil war within the GOP between the Tea Party and what remains of the responsible centre-Right.
The battle lines have been hardened over the past half-decade, as poisonous polarisation turned the idea of political opponents into personal enemies. Ideological divisions inside the Republican Party resulted in a hunt for heretics, with Tea Party senators like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee raising activist cash with infomercials to unseat fellow Republican incumbents, accusing them of being insufficiently conservative and therefore collaborators with President Barack Obama.
Fear over these proposed primary challenges led to a collapse of common sense as Republicans backed into a suicidal government shutdown strategy in an attempt to get President Obama to defund or delay his signature health care reform law. This was always going to be a non-starter because Democrats control the Senate as well as the White House. But Cruz & Co raised millions around this base-pleasing fantasy, without a real strategy for success.
Even a professional hyper-partisan like Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform felt compelled to criticise Mr Cruz, saying: “He pushed House Republicans into traffic and wandered away.”
And so the shutdown occurred, despite long-standing assurances to the contrary from GOP leadership. The inmates are now running the asylum and leadership looks impotent.
But the stalemate seemed briefly broken thanks to the looming prospect of hitting the debt ceiling on October 17 – the barrier by which the US government needs authorisation to borrow money or default on its debt. Nothing focuses the mind like the prospect of being hung, and the big money boys who fund various Tea Party groups as well as senior senators’ campaign coffers started to make their displeasure known: shut down the government over ObamaCare, sure – collapse the entire US economy, no way.
This financial incentive for strategic change was compounded by an unprecedented descent in the polls.
Politics often echo lessons from the past, and pundits have been predicting that Republican House members would lose the shutdown fight, citing the example of the 1995 government shutdown that led to Bill Clinton’s re-election. The latest set of polls – most notably from Gallup and NBC/WSJ –
show that Republicans are getting the lion’s share of the blame for the current division and dysfunction.
Seven in 10 Americans now say that the GOP are “putting politics ahead of their country”.
Moreover, polls show the Republican Party has the lowest popular approval rating of any political party in the history of polling.
This is not subtle. Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster, told clients in a memo that the data was “significant and consequential” – comparing the political sea change to the September 11, 2001 attacks and Hurricane Katrina. It is accelerated evidence of the alienation between hard-core ideologues and Main Street voters, with repercussions that will impact the midterm elections of 2014 and the 2016 presidential campaign.
You know the problem is real when a strident social conservative candidate like Virginia gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli refuses to have his picture taken with Ted Cruz for fear of offending even more swing voters.
Warned by their donors and the public, the GOP is in now in tightly-controlled panic mode. But as the nervous need for negotiations drove some Congressional Republicans into White House meetings, Tea Party activists howled their faith-based hatred of compromise at the annual Values Voters Summit across town in DC. A handful of House radicals like Representative Louie Gohmert could not help taking shots at fellow Republicans like centrist Senator John McCain – a war hero and former GOP presidential nominee – saying that he “supported al-Qaeda”
Representatives like Michele Bachmann expressed outrage over the closure of Washington monuments and memorials, despite having voted for their closure. Logic left the building long ago.
A bright spot emerged in the GOP split when Representative Paul Ryan, the 2012 Republican vice-presidential nominee, proposed a negotiated settlement on overlapping ideas of tax reform and entitlement reform, with an eye toward deficit and debt reduction. But Mr Ryan’s ambitious proposal drew the fury of Tea Party activists who quickly accused him of being a modern-day Quisling for abandoning the defund ObamaCare.
Faced with a divided opposition, President Obama feels newly emboldened and is refusing to negotiate while the shutdown continues or the debt-ceiling is used as leverage. A House Republican proposal to extend the shutdown while delaying the debt-ceiling default is therefore DOA.
This is itself a dangerous game being played by the White House, running the risk of overreach by rejecting constructive compromise at a moment of maximum influence. But the prospect of simply kicking the can down the road another six weeks in the hopes of achieving a grand bargain later looks like a fool’s errand that could inflict even more damage on the US economy.
This stubborn cycle of governing by crisis must stop. Divided government did not always mean dysfunctional government. But President Obama’s decisive win in 2012 failed to break the fever of hyper-partisanship. Perhaps the pain of this stupid self-inflicted government shutdown combined with the latest looming debt-ceiling debacle might finally shake some sense into our elected representatives. Angry donors and ugly polls might do what reason and patriotism have so far failed to inspire. But even typing those words represents the triumph of hope over experience.
The last time we went through this kamikaze kabuki, in the summer of 2011, the US avoided default but still ended up having its AAA credit rating downgraded by S&P.
Who can say with a straight face that we have learned our lesson?
There is still time for Mr Boehner and Mr Obama to put their legacies and the long-term good of the country ahead of partisan concerns. But the clock is ticking and it is later than we think. Days away from a default that no one wants, there is still no clear path forward despite this stark choice: self-government or self-sabotage.
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