John Boehner (left) and Daniel Inouye still have a way to go to reach a deal on appropriations. Senate Dems push for spending deal

Senate defeat of House Republican spending cuts puts the burden back on Speaker John Boehner to show more flexibility even as Democrats and President Barack Obama must summon more unity if they are to capitalize on the win.

“Today’s vote establishes there is clearly a need to work toward a reasonable middle ground,” White House Budget Director Jack Lew told POLITICO Wednesday. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) predicted that “this paves the way to get something done.”


Republicans fell well short of a simple majority let alone the 60 votes needed for Senate passage of the 56-44 roll call. And like the House last month, the measure won not a single Democratic vote—a remarkable failure given the political pressure on moderates running in 2012 to embrace more spending reductions.

Nonetheless, the level of Democratic unhappiness in the Senate is such that Boehner has real opportunities if he can recalibrate the House approach. Just minutes after the Republican defeat, a Democratic budget alternative failed 58-42 after a mix of moderates and liberals walked away, calling the proposal an inadequate response to the debt problems facing the nation.

“Many people are in denial around here,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) told her colleagues.

“Any plan to tackle our fiscal crisis must make a material difference in reducing the deficit,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Col.). “And everyone should be asked to shoulder part of the burden.”

Boehner’s initial reaction Wednesday was to stall for more time, saying Democrats had still failed to come up with a legitimate counter-offer to the House bill. “It’s time for Washington Democrats to present a serious plan to cut spending,” the speaker said.

But Reid, who met later with House Democratic leaders, appears open to broadening the discussion now to look beyond appropriations and include tax reform provisions or savings from mandatory programs, such as farm subsidies, for example.

“Our goal is to fund the government for the rest of this year and the out years,” Reid told reporters after the votes. “We are going to try to get a universal deal, something that’s good for the country…We’re going to look at everything.”

That’s very likely a non-starter for many House Republicans, who want to keep a single-minded focus on rolling back domestic and foreign aid appropriations to the levels seen in the last year of the Bush administration. And it’s not clear yet how far the White House, which will be increasingly driving the talks and wants a deal done in the next month, will move in that direction either.

Lew, in a brief interview, predicted “this is going to be a difficult conversation where our goal is to find savings that we can agree on.” He said Boehner and Republicans must understand that is “a line beyond which we cannot go” such as in the case of Republican cuts from Pell Grants and Head Start funding. He did not rule out entertaining other areas for savings such as mandatory programs, but his primary focus is on the appropriations issues since he must find a way to keep the government funded for the remainder of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

“It’s not black and white. If it helps get the parties to agree,” Lew said of adding other savings. And he bridled at the suggestion that the administration has been slow to state its position and spell out the consequences of the Republican cuts.

Even Wednesday, for example, Democrats were surprised that the White House issued a statement of policy opposing the House cuts but never explicitly naming the bill as a veto target. “I don’t think there was anything ambiguous about the statement we put out,” Lew said, but he appeared to concede that Cabinet departments had been discouraged from talking to the press about the impact of the cuts.

Obama met with Senate leaders Wednesday at the White House, and Republicans are clearly looking to him for help as they try to walk their own members back from the House bill. Another stop gap bill be needed to avert a shutdown next week, and the expectation is that the GOP will be more open to possibly a three to four week extension in hopes of cutting a final deal.

“Where is the president of the United States in this debate?,” complained Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a member of the party leadership. “The House is willing to take difficult steps…and the president is missing in action. I would respectfully say that is not leadership. We need the president of the United States to join us.”

The failure to pick up any Democrats—just months after November’s losses—was most telling.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who had been targeted by the GOP, told his colleagues that the House bill “has too much hate” for him to accept. And McCaskill, a second moderate in play, said the speed and size of the House cuts— $61.3 billion compressed in the second half of this fiscal year—could “cause just as big a crisis as our failure to deal with our long term structural debt.”

Indeed, after adjustments for defense dollars, the House-passed cuts truly represent a reduction of $66 billion from domestic and foreign aid programs, a 14 percent reduction that didn’t sit well with Republican moderates.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who was most outspoken in her criticism of the bill, ultimately fell in line in tandem with two other New England Republicans facing election next year: Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts. But in a statement Collins said “making such deep and immediate cuts to critical low-income heating assistance, weatherization, and Head Start programs in the middle of the fiscal year would cause serious problems for those who rely on these programs.”

“I am left with a choice between a proposal that doesn’t go nearly far enough and one that makes many wrong choices. It has long been apparent that neither proposal had the 60 votes required to pass. It is frustrating that, instead of sitting down and negotiating a serious proposal, we are forced to vote solely to `send a message.’”

If the battle now, as Lew suggests, is for that “reasonable middle ground,” both parties are losing at the edges.

On the right, conservative Sens. Rep. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah, two freshmen elected in November with tea party support, joined with Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) to vote no as a protest that the cuts did not go far enough.

“I don’t think either side recognizes the enormity of the problem or the imminence of the problem,” Paul said in floor debate.

On the left, liberals like Vermont Independent Bernard Sanders and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) opposed the Democratic alternative—and each has complained that more attention should be given to revenues as well as spending reductions.