Boehner’s team is looking for a plan -- any plan -- that can pass in the House. House GOP sees few options on debt

House Republican leaders don’t know how they’re going to address the debt limit later this summer, but early plans show that Washington is casually strolling into a five-month political and legislative minefield.

A clean debt-limit increase without any strings attached — essentially what President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are asking for — doesn’t stand a chance of passing the conservative chamber.


Speaker John Boehner’s leadership team is looking to squeeze out of an ideologically diverse House Republican Conference anything that can pass. Ahead of a members-only, two-hour meeting next Tuesday, the top idea bouncing around GOP leadership is casually being referred to as a catch-all, kitchen sink plan.

( PHOTOS: What’s in Obama’s 2014 budget)

The plan is simple: craft a debt ceiling hike onto a bill loaded with tons of conservative goodies to put lots of options on the table to garner 218 GOP votes.

Options being floated internally include language approving the Keystone XL pipeline, slashing regulations with the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act and additional spending cuts — perhaps even a framework for tax reform.

To make it even more attractive to voters back home, they’d frame it as a so-called job-creation bill. Basically, anything they could say creates jobs has a chance of landing in this legislative package.

There’s also real effort from the right — supported by leadership — to forestall Obama’s health care law in the fight to lift the debt ceiling. Top lawmakers at the Republican Study Committee have met with the Congressional Budget Office to inquire how much the government would save if they delayed the implementation of the health care exchanges and expansion of Medicaid.

“When you have Max Baucus saying it’s a train wreck; when you have every business guy I talk to saying, ‘This thing is a problem and a mess,’ it seems to me there’s elements of that to focus on,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, a conservative from Ohio.

It’s the red-meat kind of stuff Republicans love. Forget that most of it faces stiff headwinds in the Senate, but conversations throughout the Republican Conference show how difficult it will be for GOP leadership to coalesce around a plan.

The most popular opening gamut — cobbling a bunch of conservative ideas together — is splitting the GOP leadership.

“I’m not sold on that,” said Oklahoma Rep. James Lankford, a member of leadership who chairs the party’s policy arm. “Because I think it can come across as sounding gimmicky at some point, but in reality, we have to have economic activity that actually drives it.

“So it’s gotta be proved that if we do this debt ceiling increase, we’re actually going to get the economic activity out of it,” he added. “So gathering enough things together to offset a debt ceiling increase — that may work for a short term to buy a couple months. But not a long term.”

Leadership won’t be able to escape the spotlight: The debt ceiling is almost certainly going to be hit this fall, which could create a double threat of government shutdown and a debt default. The government runs out of money on Sept. 30. Republican aides say that might help them enact entitlement changes and perhaps even replace some sequester cuts.

Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) are considering setting up the first debt ceiling vote before the August recess, but even that carries risk. Leadership insiders say rank-and-file Republicans could go home to their deep-red districts only to suffer the wrath of constituents who sent them to Washington to stop racking up debt.

If they go home empty-handed, they will return in September with somewhere between four and eight weeks before the nation defaults on its debt.

Either way, a GOP looking to rebrand itself as a serious governing alternative risks looking like a party stuck in the past by pushing for legislation that the Senate and White House have rejected time and time again.

These are questions that define this Republican majority: What exactly should they stand for? Take this week as a prime example: House Republicans passed a bill to give employers the ability to pay overtime or give comp time to employees — a bid to appeal to families. And then, Cantor announced that Republicans would for the nearly 40th time vote to repeal Obama’s health care law.

The debt ceiling presents unique challenges for Republican leadership, and they often seek the counsel of what some refer to as the Fab Five — conservative leaders Jordan, Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, RSC Chairman Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Reps. Jeb Hensarling of Texas and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. In January, their support of leadership’s plan to reshuffle the year’s fiscal battles smoothed what otherwise would’ve been a rough few months for Boehner’s leadership team.

They’ve been working behind the scenes to take the pulse of the conservatives in the RSC. Scalise has formally canvassed the group in search of just what might pass muster this fall.

“The five of us are going to come to an agreement to solve the spending problem and get us on a path to balance, and hopefully, we can work with our conference to bring an idea to them that they’ll embrace,” Scalise said in an interview.

Jordan, a former RSC chair, has his ideas, which foreshadow the fight ahead. Jordan wants elements of the Republican budget — which has passed several times since 2011 — to be incorporated into the debt ceiling legislation.

“The parameters are already set, and [it was] already established back in January,” Jordan told POLITICO. “The parameters are: You have to put the country back into balance so that’s implementing policies, doing things that are consistent — you’re not going to get all the Ryan plan — but it’s implementing policies that are consistent with that budget. It’s gotta put us on the path to balance.”

The approach of slapping a number of conservative ideas together represents one pole — the other approach is embodied in what Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) is pushing toward. Camp, with the tacit support of Ryan, has been advocating tying tax reform to the debt ceiling — an approach that has drawn skeptics and supporters in GOP leadership.

Conservatives are skeptical of that as well.

“If we can get true tax reform actually part of the package, that could be huge,” Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) said. “The devil is in the details so that you get all the details in the package and achieve it, rather than triggers that may or may not be hit.”

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