As the Senate opened for another weekend session Saturday, McConnell accused Obama of undermining congressional leaders and demanded that the White House send an emissary to new talks. “We can’t do it by ourselves,” he said. “Let’s get to talking to the administration again in the hopes that we can come together behind something that can pass both the Senate and the House and be signed into law before Tuesday.”
McConnell and Boehner offered reassurances that there would be no default.
Speaker John Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell both said that they believe an agreement will be reached between the two parties to pass a bill that raises the debt ceiling before the August 2 deadline. (July 30)
Four possible options the Senate could take if it tables the House debt-reduction proposal.
Budget, debt ceiling glossary
“I am confident and optimistic we’re going to get an agreement,” McConnell said, standing next to Boehner, who added: “Despite our differences, we’re dealing with reasonable, responsible people who want this crisis to end as quickly as possible.”
This is not the first time McConnell has been cast in the role of the “reasonable, responsible” one in the face of financial calamity.
In late September 2008, during the Wall Street crisis, Boehner, then minority leader, rallied only a third of his conference behind the proposed $700 billion bailout. As the vote failed on a Monday afternoon, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped nearly 778 points, the largest single-day drop ever.
Quietly, over the next 24 hours, McConnell engaged Reid in secret talks. Late Tuesday, after the Senate had been dormant for hours and most staff members had gone home, Reid and McConnell announced they would attach a set of popular tax breaks to the bailout fund, leading to passage of the revised legislation.
“This is one of the finer moments in the Senate. We have come together on a bipartisan basis and structured a way forward on an important rescue package for our country,” McConnell said that night.
The hope now is that somehow they can find a way forward on the debt ceiling before Tuesday night. “Both are institutionalists and have a lot of respect for the Senate,” said Jim Manley, a former aide to Reid. “They rarely agree, but they go out of their way not to blindside one another.”
That lingering adherence to institutional courtesy, so absent in the House last week, may help rescue the deal in the Senate, in part because McConnell so believes in the chamber’s role.
As a Senate intern in summer 1963, McConnell watched the March on Washington from the Capitol’s west front. In law school at the University of Kentucky, he wrote a thesis on the Senate’s judicial confirmation process.
After his election in 1984, he cut a slow and steady path toward less glamorous assignments designed to show hard work, earning him chits with his colleagues. He served as the top Republican on the ethics and rules committees, not coveted positions, and twice ran the GOP’s campaign committee. All the while he honed his skills as a master tactician of Senate parliamentary maneuvers.
His sole ambition has been to be Senate majority leader. In the fall of 2006, as Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) was retiring and McConnell was moving into the top job, Republicans suffered a devastating six-seat defeat. Instead, McConnell became minority leader, and even after the GOP wave of 2010, he came up four seats short.
McConnell’s leadership style has been notoriously subdued. He is rarely off-message. He peppers his comments with phrases such as “at the risk of being redundant” when he repeats his mantra of the moment. At a recent breakfast briefing with reporters, he bragged that he was the master of “the unexpressed thought.”
Three weeks ago, McConnell thought he had found a way out of the debt crisis, one that offered, he thought, a palatable political outcome for Republicans. His plan would have allowed the president to lift the debt limit on his own three times between next month and 2013, with Congress having the power to reject that only if a two-thirds majority voted to block the move. It would allow every Republican to vote against the unpopular debt-ceiling increase, placing the political onus completely on Obama and Democrats.
But what some saw as a political masterstroke others considered traitorous. Some House GOP freshmen called it the “Pontius Pilate plan” because it did not guarantee any spending cuts. McConnell’s name became so toxic among House Republicans that when GOP aides unveiled Boehner’s plan Monday, they declined to invoke the Senate leader’s name even as they made clear they were including portions of the plan that he had laid out.
Whatever deal is reached to raise the debt ceiling, McConnell’s prints will be all over it, even if not everyone can see them.
“With Reid and McConnell at the helm, they can still outsmart the newer members,” Manley said.
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