With just three days to go before Congress’s deadline to raise the debt ceiling and avoid sending the country into default, leaders continued to struggle Saturday to work out a bipartisan deal that can pass both chambers and be signed into law by President Obama.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) delivered a letter Saturday afternoon to Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), signed by 43 Republicans, declaring that Reid’s debt-limit legislation was unacceptable.
Needing 60 votes to clear a filibuster hurdle, Reid’s current draft is assured of failure in a 1 a.m. vote Sunday. McConnell demanded that President Obama re-engage in negotiations. “It isn’t going to pass,” McConnell said Saturday in a floor speech. “Let’s get talking to the administration.”
Obama, meanwhile, repeated his call that Republicans must compromise and accept a “bipartisan” deal if the nation is to avoid its first-ever default.
“It must have the support of both parties that were sent here to represent the American people – not just one faction of one party,” the president said in his weekly address Saturday. “There are multiple ways to resolve this problem. Congress must find common ground on a plan that can get support from both parties in the House. And it’s got to be a plan that I can sign by Tuesday.”
The House was expected to vote around 2 p.m. on Reid’s debt ceiling plan. The vote will be on Reid’s original plan, not the re-worked version he presented in the Senate on Friday night — and it is expected to fail easily., just as House Speaker John Boehner’s plan failed late Friday in the Senate.
House GOP leaders won narrow approval of that plan to raise the federal debt limitFriday after revising the measure to appeal to rebellious conservatives.
Heading into the final weekend before theTreasury expects to begin running short of cash to pay the nation’s bills, Reid (D-Nev.)introduced a new version of his plan to grant the government additional borrowing authority into 2013, setting up a crucial vote in the Senate shortly after midnight Saturday.
Democrats conceded that they still lack the votes to repel a GOP filibuster. Reid beseeched his Republican counterpart,McConnell, to join him in reworking the measure so the Senate could pass it and send it back to the House before slumping financial markets open Monday morning.
But in a phone call Friday evening, McConnell told Reid he wanted the White House at the table and expressed frustration that President Obama had rejected an emerging compromise between the two Senate leaders last weekend. Aides said McConnell expected to speak with administration officials Friday night and tamped down talk of an impasse. But Senate Democratic leaders reacted with outrage, accusing McConnell of blocking a deal.
“Unless there is a compromise or they accept my bill, we’re headed for economic disaster,” Reid said.
The late-night jousting in the Senate followed a vote on House Speaker John A. Boehner’sdebt-limit measure, which would extend the Treasury’s borrowing power until early next year and force another economy-rattling fistfight within a few months,
SOURCE:WASHINGTON POST
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