Republican senators are maneuvering to cut a big bipartisan deal. GOP vs GOP on fiscal deal

The endgame over the 11-day-old government shutdown is now a pitched competition between Senate and House Republicans.

Each of the conferences is charting its own course to end the saga and evade a debt limit crisis on Oct. 17. But after two weeks of intraparty turmoil, neither side seems to trust the other about what the way out should look like. Senior senators describe little coordination between Republicans on each side of the Capitol on important decisions like spending levels and how long the government should be funded and the debt ceiling raised.


The lines are so crossed that GOP senators asked President Barack Obama during a White House meeting on Friday to fill them in on the House plan, senators attending the meeting said. They simply hadn’t seen it.

Republican senators are maneuvering to cut a big bipartisan deal with the backing of the White House, which could jam a House GOP that is on a separate track in pursuit of a shorter-term fix. Senior House Republicans are scoffing at the leading Senate GOP proposal, while keeping their GOP Senate colleagues in the dark about their latest plans to end the impasse.

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Asked if he’d rather see the Senate GOP cut a deal with the White House rather than the House, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) responded: “Given what we’ve seen so far, yes.”

“House Republicans so far, don’t want to get rid of the shutdown. I don’t know in what world we’re faring well under the shutdown in terms of policy or politics,” Flake said.

“Nope,” said Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) when asked if he liked the leading Senate GOP offer, drafted by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “We’re working on something else.”

The House-Senate GOP divide is the latest sign of the growing Republican anxiety over how to end the first government shutdown in 17 years. Some polls indicate the fiscal standoff is sending the GOP to a historic nadir, a result that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) described as “devastating.”

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It’s becoming clear to Republicans that an endgame is in motion, but it’s less clear what the party will get out of a shutdown that began on the House condition that Obama thoroughly degrade his health care law.

“How do you get the 218? And do they get something out of this they can point to?” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) of the House’s pursuit of a win on some aspect of Obamacare.

The leading Senate GOP proposal has been drafted by Collins and in its current form would keep the government open for six months at current spending levels, raise the debt limit through January, delay Obamacare’s medical device tax for two years, require income verification for Obamacare subsidies and give federal agencies more flexibility to work within the constraints of the sequester. Democratic and Republican party leaders have encouraged Collins to hammer something out but has not signed off on her framework, which has changed several times over the past day.

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Put simply, most senators want to go bigger than the House Republican plan to lift the debt ceiling until Nov. 20, open the government into mid-December and create a framework for budget talks involving the House, Senate and White House. Those budget talks would include requiring Medicare means testing for wealthier taxpayers. At first the House was discussing only raising the debt ceiling and not reopening the government, which Collins called “baffling” and was widely derided among the Senate Republican caucus.

The bigger the deal, the more each side will have to give.

“Most members would like this to be out further so that predictability and confidence is there. But that comes with a bigger price tag,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.).

Some Republicans want the House to go first, given they are in the majority. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) went over to House Speaker John Boehner’s office on Friday afternoon to try to smooth things over between the two chambers.

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“There are ways to change Obamacare without defunding it or a one-year delay of the individual mandate. And I laid out some of those ideas. And the question is can the House find the center of gravity to open the government up around those ideas?” Graham said. “If it came out of the House it’d be better for everybody.”

In the Senate, the idea is to cut a bipartisan deal — one that would be accepted by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — to reopen the government and avert the first-ever debt default next week.

After the White House meeting, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) predicted the process would play out like this: “I think you’ll have a House plan kind of morph into a Senate plan and there will be a way forward.” But whether the House GOP accepts what the Senate proposes remains to be seen, given the feeling in the House that their Republican colleagues in the Senate give in far too much to the White House.

The narrative is further confused because Obama has expressed openness to the work being done by Republicans in both chambers. Obama sounded receptive to the House plan by pointing to one of its features: He said it would increase money for military, education and health care, while slowing down the growth of entitlement programs, according to Republican senators.

At the White House Friday, spokesman Jay Carney said the president had some concerns with the House plan but vowed to continue talking with the House GOP.

“It is a marked difference from where we had been,” Carney said. “The president appreciates the approach the speaker and others have taken.”

But as of late Friday afternoon, many Senate Republicans had no idea where their House counterparts were heading.

Asked about the House plan, Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said: “I don’t know what’s in it.” Later in the afternoon, Cornyn went to the speaker’s office to find out himself.

After taking a back-seat role, many Senate Republicans are now eager to take matters into their own hands, believing that if they allow the House GOP to continue to drive the strategy, it would only keep the government closed for longer and make it less likely a deal would be reached to avert a default. It is abundantly clear that provisions to gut or delay Obamacare would not emerge in a final deal, even though it was the House GOP’s demands to target the unpopular law that prompted the budget impasse in the first place.

GOP senators are still perplexed by that tactic.

“Obviously, there was a better strategy than shutting down the government in order to defund Obamacare, because where we are is Obamcare is chugging along and the government is shut down after two weeks,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

In some ways, how the next few days play out could mirror the strategy in past fiscal deals, including efforts in 2011 and 2012 to extend a payroll tax cut and avert the fiscal cliff, where bipartisan deals were approved by huge bipartisan majorities in the Senate, forcing the House to acquiesce.

Even though Collins’s proposal is far more limited in its demands than earlier House GOP proposals, Democrats in Congress signaled Friday that they are not willing to give in much to Republicans with their backs against the wall. But at the White House, Obama sounded receptive to the Collins plan and even open to delaying or repealing the medical device tax, GOP senators said.

“There are some things that aren’t central to the core of Obamacare that he’s happy to consider,” said Alexander.

Edward-Isaac Dovere and Jake Sherman contributed to this report.