Senate Planning Shutdown Deal; Will the House Screw It All Up?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are reportedly in the final stages of working out a deal to reopen the government and avoid a national default. Great news. Now the question is if said deal will be able to get through the goddamn mess that is the House of Representatives.
Despite the fact that this entire debacle started out with the GOP attempting to gut or delay the Affordable Care Act, Politico reports that the proposed Senate deal will leave Obamacare mostly untouched.
Under the plan, a $986 billion government funding bill would reopen federal agencies until Jan. 15, and the debt ceiling would be lifted until Feb. 7. The two parties would be given the opportunity to cut a larger-scale budget agreement to slash future deficits as a bicameral conference committee would have until Dec. 13 to finalize such a deal.
Democrats won a major White House priority to ensure that the Treasury Department would still have the ability to use "extraordinary measures" to pay its bills in case Congress does not lift the debt ceiling by Feb. 7. Republicans would win a provision ensuring that recipients of Obamacare subsidies meet the required income levels.
And several sources said the deal drops a Democratic priority: No delay of an Obamacare reinsurance tax sought by labor unions, known as the "belly-button tax."
Again, there is no guarantee that this plan is going to make it through the House, but Politico notes that many Republicans in Congress are ready to put an end to this embarrassing chapter in the party's history. "The only reason why the Democrats don’t look terrible is we look even worse," Republican Senator Roy Blunt said.
GOP Senator Lindsey Graham also admitted his party has fucked up before saying that the Democrats now need to cut them some slack:
We won't be the last political party to overplay our hand. It might happen one day on the Democratic side. And if it did, would Republicans, for the good of the country, kinda give a little? We really did go too far. We screwed up. But their response is making things worse, not better.
[Image via AP]