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A weekly update on bills that CQ's editors are tracking.
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| Deal or No Deal? |
July 22, 2011 |
by CQ Roll Call
 he momentum behind the revived “grand bargain” talks between Obama and Boehner continued today. The more the two of them urge the rest of Washington to calm down — “Media accounts are speculating about a ‘deal’ between Republicans and the White House that does not exist,” the Speaker said on his Facebook page this morning — the more it looks like their plan might actually come together in the next day or two.
Reid said this morning that the Obama-Boehner talks sounded serious enough that he and McConnell have decided to put on hold their preparations for moving “Plan B” through the Senate starting this weekend — and he told senators they were free to join the House in being out of town Saturday and Sunday, after all.
Of course, the big deal may well fall apart for a second time, although for the opposite reason of what killed their first approach. Two weekends ago, Cantor and the House GOP rank and file rebelled at talk of making taxes one-quarter of a $4 trillion deal. This weekend, concern is sharpening that a package promising deep entitlement curbs (including changing the measure of inflation used to adjust Social Security benefits, which would mean they’d go down) would account for half of $3 trillion in cuts — while holding out only the promise of a revenue-raising tax overhaul next year — cannot not win over the minimal 13 Democrats necessary to get through the Senate.
The focus of rank-and-file interest today is talk that Obama and Boehner will create dueling poison pills, one that each party would have to take if a tax and entitlement package did not become law in time to start taking effect in 2013. For the GOP penalty, Democrats want to make the Bush tax cuts expire for those making above $250,000. Republicans want Democrats to swallow a scaling-back of the health care law and elimination of the individual mandate.
But even those triggers may not be enough to salve Democrats who see the president as preparing to sacrifice so much of what their party has stood for to get this deal — and also to take away the defining issues they believe could help them take back the House and maybe hold the Senate next fall.
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by CQ Roll Call
Kent Conrad, who only a few weeks ago vowed to campaign against any bill that raised the debt limit without cutting at least $4 trillion from projected deficits over a decade, conceded today that it will be impossible to write the $3.7 trillion Gang of Six plan into legislation and get it enacted in the next two weeks.
That is in large measure because, despite all the initial hoopla when it was released two days ago, only 40 or so senators (and only about 15 of them Republicans) have pledged in writing their support for the group’s outline, with many others saying they’re holding back until they see the detailed language. It’s also because the furious reaction from organized labor and other liberal interest groups is quickly tamping down Democratic enthusiasm..
The Senate Budget chairman’s concession underscores that whatever McConnell and Reid decide to do is undeniably Plan A with a bullet — the default setting being that their evolving package of between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion in spending cuts can be pushed through the Senate by next weekend and then essentially forced on the recalcitrant House as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. And if they “leave it,” the theory goes, those extra days Obama has created and a potentially dramatic signal of Wall Street anxiety will prompt enough tea party Republicans (more than 80 have signed a letter vowing to oppose the deal) and the liberal Democratic critics who emerged publicly yesterday to change their minds to get a slightly modified bill through on the second try — when the time-is-leverage maxim will no longer apply.
| So, which one is it? |
July 20, 2011 |
by CQ Roll Call
The Gang of Six proposal is either too much, too late — or too much at just the right moment.
Or, more likely, it’s sort of both — and sorting it all out will mean that in 13 days there will be the kind of stopgap, short-term increase in the debt ceiling of a couple of hundred billion dollars (accompanied by an equivalent amount of spending cuts) that all aides have said for weeks is not an option. In the end, it’s probably Plan C, which buys time for genuine tough-choice legislating this fall to reduce deficits during the next decade. The day after tomorrow, after all, was the agreed-upon deadline for a handshake deal. That's not close yet.
The Gang of Six calls for only $500 billion in deficit reduction (mainly by capping discretionary spending and slowly switching to “chained” CPI as the government’s inflation measure, which would have the effect of curbing Social Security benefits and raising taxes) right away — i.e. before the debt ceiling is raised. And that alone makes it a non-starter unless the GOP drops its insistence on a 1-to-1 ratio of budget savings to new borrowing power, or unless Obama drops his insistence on getting enough new borrowing power now to last past the election.
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