Budget Talks Stall
The New York Times reports:
With time running short and budget negotiations this week having reached an angry impasse, Congressional leaders are growing increasingly pessimistic about reaching a bipartisan deal that would avert a government shutdown in early April.
Senior Democratic officials involved in high-level efforts to bring House Republicans, Senate Democrats and the White House to a budget agreement said that while some progress had been made toward an accord on an overall level of spending cuts, the parties remained divided on the final figure and had to resolve the fate of ideologically charged policy provisions demanded by House conservatives.
Some senior Republicans, after relying on House Democrats to help pass the most recent short-term measure, are also uneasy about having to team up with Democrats again to pass any compromise that dips too far below the $61 billion in spending reductions endorsed by the House for the current fiscal year. Senate Democrats want to wring some of the savings out of mandatory spending programs like Medicare, an approach Republicans are resisting.
Aides said that even if myriad outstanding issues were resolved and an agreement struck late next week after lawmakers returned, it would be a challenge to write the legislation and move it through Congress before the current financing bill expires on April 8.
“A deal is still possible, but it would take a real breakthrough,” said one senior official, who like others knowledgeable about the confidential budget negotiations would discuss them only without being publicly identified.
The tension surrounding the talks and the potential for a shutdown boiled into public view Friday evening as House Republican leaders issued a series of harsh statements accusing Democrats of failing to make a serious offer on spending cuts. Representative Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican and the House majority leader, labeled as “completely far-fetched” a claim by Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, that negotiators were making progress.
Speaker John A. Boehner joined in with a statement that accused Democrats of lacking a fiscal plan. “If Democrats don’t have a plan, do they intend to shut down the government because they can’t agree among themselves?” he asked.
Democrats fired back, suggesting that Republicans were backtracking under pressure from House conservatives allied with the Tea Party who were opposed to any compromise with Democrats in the budget debate.
“After days of positive negotiations, with significant flexibility shown by the speaker, the House Republican leadership is back to agonizing over whether to give in to right-wing demands that they abandon any compromise on their extreme cuts,” Mr. Schumer said. “Instead of lashing out at Democrats in a knee-jerk way, we hope House Republicans will finally stand up to the Tea Party and resume the negotiations that had seemed so full of promise.”
Congressional officials said the budget talks were set back significantly in a meeting Tuesday when the participants feuded over what legislation should serve as the benchmark for the talks — the House-passed spending measure with $61 billion in cuts for this year or an interim budget bill approved by Congress in early March that maintained financing for most programs at their current levels.
Democrats, who believed they had an agreement to work off the stopgap plan, felt blindsided, officials said. Jacob J. Lew, the White House budget director and chief Democratic negotiator, angrily resisted the Republican push to use the House measure as the starting point. The meeting abruptly broke up, with talks resuming haltingly since then.
