In the past, this would be the moment for late-night favors and veiled threats, for whispered messages from the party leaders: “I need you on this.” This would be the point at which the congressional bosses would have agreed to a concocted deal and then wrangle the votes for it with strong-arm tactics as old as the Capitol’s marble.
Not this time.
A new take on the overlapping priorities that led us to record deficits, and who voted for them.
The current debt-ceiling debate is occurring after a string of bitter elections has left Congress with few of the old characteristics that once made compromise possible: There are fewer moderate legislators. There is little trust and less fear of party leaders. And there is almost no appetite left for public favor-trading.
On Monday, it had come to this: House GOP leaders proposed their solution to the crisis and found they couldn’t even make a deal within their own caucus. “It’s time to get serious about solving America’s problems, and I believe our plan is a good step in the right direction,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said of his plan.
“I gotta sleep on all this,” said freshman Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), after hearing Boehner’s pitch.
“We’ve got to see the details,” said Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), another freshman. “We’ll see how the rest of us vote.”
Monday’s events signaled how far off-script this showdown has veered from the Hill’s accustomed ways. In both parties, leaders say they want an agreement to avert a national default. Both know they have just a week to work one out.
But on Monday, the two sides appeared to go backwards, despite their best intentions.
Democrats proposed a plan to raise the debt ceiling by $2.7 trillion and cut an equal amount from the federal budget. Republicans rejected that one, and proposed their own: it would raise the debt ceiling by $1 trillion and impose $1.2 trillion in cuts. It would also include long-term caps on federal spending, and require a congressional committee to seek even more budget cuts in the coming months.
Democrats rejected it as too conservative.
Many in the Republican ranks dismissed it as not conservative enough.
“Washington wants a deal,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who chairs a group of dozens of conservative legislators called the Republican Study Committee. He, like other conservatives, came out against the Boehner solution
This is a curious distinction on Capitol Hill where the deal has always been the solution.
Congress has rarely done anything memorable without a compromise, and the Capitol is full of monuments to the men who made them: Sen. Henry Clay in the 1800s, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson and Sen. Everett Dirksen in the 1950s and House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Often, their deals were made with quiet persuasion — seeking out members on the fence, and finding what it would take to knock them off.
“It may be somebody wants to take a trip to Rome to meet the pope. It may be somebody wants a political favor from the president. Maybe somebody wants to go on a trip to the Middle East,” said former representative Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), who served in Congress from 1965 to 1999. He now heads the Center on Congress at Indiana University. “There’s all kinds of favors that can be handed out.”
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