“In the category of getting serious, I have spoken to both the president and the vice president within the last hour,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said. “We are now fully engaged, the speaker and I, with the one person in America out of 307 million people who can sign a bill into law.”
After returning to the Senate from a White House meeting, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) accused McConnell of not negotiating in “good faith” and holding “meaningless press conferences” in which he claims to be engaged. Reid said other members of the Republican Conference were truly talking and McConnell was just stalling.
“I guess talking is a step in the right direction, but that’s about it,” Reid said.
A smiling McConnell interrupted Reid to inform him that he had just “cut short a conversation with the vice president” to come to the Senate floor for an “important vote” on a quorum — essentially an attendance-taking vote — that Reid had called.
It may have been predictable that it would come to this. McConnell’s fingerprints are on every big bipartisan deal and every key spending bill to emerge from the Congress in recent years. He secretly negotiated, with Vice President Biden, the deal to extend the George W. Bush-era tax cuts last December. And three years ago, in an environment eerily similar to the current stalemate, it was McConnell who helped rescue a bailout package for the financial services industry from a humiliating defeat on the House floor.
In recent days, McConnell struck a notably low profile as House Republicans struggled to pass a debt-ceiling bill. His reticence, in part, was designed to give House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) the room he needed to try to pass his own proposal in the House, a plan that would have been undermined if House Republicans thought that Boehner’s legislation was going to be modified in the Senate with McConnell’s help. But even more than his desire to help Boehner, McConnell’s stony silence was the result of his irritation with Obama for scuttling what he thought was a deal last week.
According to Democrats and Republicans, McConnell told Obama a week ago that congressional leaders should strike the deal on their own; they had done it before. And so for two days they huddled in the Capitol, getting close to a broad deal, until McConnell learned from Reid that Obama had nixed the plan because it did not ensure a debt-ceiling extension into 2013. That remained a key sticking point late Saturday, and McConnell was no longer silent.
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