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Senate Struggles to Muster Republican Support for a New Fiscal Compromise

“We now have a level of seriousness with the right people at the table,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, said during a news conference he held with Speaker John A. Boehner. He said that Republicans were now “fully engaged” in discussions with the White House and that he expected a deal soon.

Both men expressed confidence they could find an acceptable resolution to a crisis that has nerves frayed on Capitol Hill, a tension illustrated in a heated House debate where House Republicans pre-emptively rejected the latest debt limit proposal from Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader.

Just how they would get a resolution remained unclear given the months of partisan fighting over the debt limit and the fact that any deal would have to clear a Senate controlled by Democrats and a House dominated by Republicans who as recently as last Thursday had rebelled against Mr. Boehner’s own proposal.

In another indication of some possible movement toward an agreement, President Obama called Mr. Reid and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, to the White House on Saturday afternoon to confer over the situation. The burst of activity came as Senate Democrats struggled to round up Republican support for Mr. Reid’s plan, which is scheduled for a vote early Sunday morning.

Their efforts were set back Saturday when 43 of the 47 Republican senators signed a letter to Mr. Reid saying they would not back his proposal that would allow a $2.4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling in two stages while establishing a new Congressional committee to explore deeper spending cuts. The numbers signaled that without changes in the plan, Mr. Reid would not be able to overcome a Republican filibuster, which requires 60 votes.

House Republicans signaled their disapproval of the Reid plan by holding a symbolic vote on Saturday, rejecting it by a 246 to 173 vote, in a move intended to show it had no chance of passing in that chamber. About a dozen Democrats joined Republicans in rejecting the Reid plan.

The pre-emptive vote could strengthen the hand of Mr. McConnell as he seeks additional concessions from Mr. Reid.

Mr. Reid, for his part, said Mr. McConnell was dragging his feet on beginning talks to find a compromise solution, and he called on Republicans to offer their plans to alter his measure.

“We have heard very little from the Republicans,” Mr. Reid said on the floor. “My friend the Republican leader must generate some more action on the part of his Republicans.”

But Mr. McConnell, in a floor exchange with his Democratic counterpart, indicated that Republicans wanted to first have a chance to oppose Mr. Reid’s measure before entering new talks. He also demanded that the president take part in any final negotiations.

“We’ve got a couple of days to work this out and we can’t do it without the president,” Mr. McConnell said.

The unusual Saturday session came after a week of brinkmanship on Capitol Hill. On Friday, Mr. Boehner managed to pass his own House bill, along party lines, just a day after suspending the vote as the Republican leadership tried frantically to line up enough votes for passage. But that plan was swiftly rejected by the Senate late Friday.

While some of the back-and-forth between the House and Senate and the party leaders was typical of the late stages of a negotiation, the combative and unyielding tone in both chambers of Congress was creating more pessimism about the prospects that a final agreement could be struck and cleared before Tuesday.

Mr. Obama, who has warned that the government could run short of money as soon as Wednesday morning, laid the blame for the impasse squarely on House Republicans in his weekly address, which largely repeated remarks he made on Friday as the stalemate gripped Washington.

“Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been listening and have shown themselves willing to make compromises to solve this crisis,” he said. “Now all of us — including Republicans in the House of Representatives — need to demonstrate the same kind of responsibility.”

In the Republican video response, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona said that “Republicans have tried to work with Democrats” to raise the debt ceiling, “but we need them to work with us.”

Though the current Senate plan was in serious trouble, Democrats and the administration were exploring ways to adjust it to win some Republican backing and send it back to the House as a final offer to raise the debt limit and avert a default after Tuesday.

If a measure is able to win significant bipartisan endorsement in the Senate, the reception in the House could be different with the Treasury Department’s Aug. 2 deadline for increasing the debt limit imminent.

Jackie Calmes contributed reporting from Washington, and Thom Shanker from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3bd08865264e67df9311c9d7d10d6651

Deadline Passes as Debt Ceiling Talks Languish

The dueling plans emerged after Mr. Boehner walked away from negotiations with the White House on Friday, leading to a frustrating weekend of talks in heat-scorched Washington. The leaders of both parties variously negotiated together over the phone, talked separately, conferred with their caucuses and tried to plot an end to the debt crisis that would assure the capital markets around the world that America would meet its debt obligations.

As the Aug. 2 deadline for lifting the debt ceiling nears, warnings are growing that the nation’s economy may be damaged by the protracted stalemate. A downgrade of the nation’s credit rating, which could raise the cost of borrowing, seemed more likely, deal or no deal.

Mr. Reid, the Senate’s top Democrat, was trying on Sunday to cobble together a plan to raise the government’s debt limit by $2.4 trillion through the 2012 elections, with spending cuts of about $2.7 trillion that would not touch any of the entitlement programs that are dear to Democrats or raise taxes, which is anathema to Republicans.

President Obama could endorse such a plan, even though it would fall far short of the ambitious goal of deficit reduction and entitlement changes that he says are necessary to shore up the nation’s finances.

At the White House on Sunday evening, Mr. Obama spent about an hour meeting in the Oval Office to try to hash out details of the Democratic proposal with Mr. Reid and the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi. The two emerged from the meeting with nothing to say to the throngs of reporters who had been encamped there for the third consecutive weekend, awaiting an agreement on the debt ceiling.

But administration and Congressional officials said that during the meeting, Mr. Obama and the Democratic leaders had resolved to hold firm against any short-term agreement that did not raise the debt ceiling beyond next year’s presidential elections.

“You see how hard this is right now,” one administration official said Sunday night. “Can you imagine going through this again in six months?”

That means, officials say, that Mr. Reid’s proposal may gather steam as the only viable alternative that is palatable to the administration.

The contours of Mr. Boehner’s backup plan were not entirely clear, but it seemed likely to take the form of a two-step process, with about $1 trillion in cuts, an amount the Republicans said was sufficient to clear the way for a debt limit increase through year’s end. That would be followed by future cuts guided by a new legislative commission that would consider a broader range of trims, program overhauls and revenue increases.

“The preferable path would be a bipartisan plan that involves all the leaders, but it is too early to decide whether that’s possible,” Mr. Boehner said in a “Fox News Sunday” interview. “If that’s not possible, I and my Republican colleagues in the House are prepared to move on our own.”

In a conference call with Republican lawmakers that lasted over an hour on Sunday night, Mr. Boehner said he was seeking “a vehicle that can pass in both houses,” according to someone on the call, who added that Mr. Boehner had made an emotional appeal to his fellow Republicans to stick together. “If we’re divided,” he said, “our leverage gets minimized.”

One freshman lawmaker on the call described Mr. Boehner as sounding weary and said many Republicans were focused on some version of a balanced budget amendment, which was already passed by the House as part of broader legislation but then rejected by the Senate.

For the White House, the Reid proposal represents a Hail Mary pass that is meant to, at the very least, avoid putting the country through a repeat of the debt ceiling negotiations next year, an election year.

Jackie Calmes contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=7f007ac112b17d59cd800dcc7f74ae7b

Senate Struggles to Muster Republican Support for a New Fiscal Compromise

Deadline Passes as Debt Ceiling Talks Languish

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