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Majority leader Harry Reid hopes for deal with Mitch McConnell
'in next 48 hours' after Obama rejects six-week debt ceiling extension
offered by House Republicans
Senate majority leader Harry Reid meets
President Obama in the Oval Office of the White House. Photograph: Mandel
Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
Two senior senators
have taken on the fraught process of finding a congressional deal to reopen
the US government and raise the country's borrowing limit, just four days
before the Treasury is scheduled to run out of money.
The Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and his
Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell, long-time adversaries, met on
Saturday morning after it became clear that a separate
attempt to broker a deal, between the Republican-dominated House of
Representatives and the White House, had failed.
Focus shifted to the Senate when President Barack Obama rejected a plan from House Republicans to extend the so-called debt ceiling
by just six weeks and made no offer lift the US government shutdown. Reid
told reporters his meeting with McConnell had been "cordial" and
added that they were only at preliminary stages.
"We don't have
anything done yet – there's a long way to go before something like that will
happen," he said, adding that he hoped to achieve a deal "in the
next 48 hours".
Reid, McConnell and
two other senators – the Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander and New York
Democrat Charles Schumer – met in Reid's office at 9am on Saturday, for just
under an hour. Later in the day, Reid and Schumer met Obama in the Oval
Office at the White House.
 Charles Schumer. Photograph: EPA
The
four senators were described by a senior congressional aide as a
"nucleus" that could now rescue the country from default. However
at a press conference, Reid and Schumer expressed only cautious optimism, and
after a strategy meeting with fellow Democrats, the California senator Dianne
Feinstein said she could not see any way through the current impasse.
"There are people that have different proposals – there are probably
four or five of those," she said. "But the proposals that will get
the leadership of the House, the Senate, and the president, are not out there
at this time."
On the Senate floor, a
Democratic procedural measure that would have moved the Senate to a vote to
extend ceiling through
the end of 2014, with no contingencies attached, fell after it failed to
secure the 60 votes required.
There was then hope
that a bipartisan bill, by the Maine Republican senator Susan Collins with
input from a West Virginia Democrat, Joe Manchin, might offer a way forward.
That would have increased the borrowing limit until January 2014 and
reopening the government until March, in return for concessions aimed at
pleasing Republicans, who precipiated the crisis when they failed to pass a
budget resolution to ontinue the funding of federal services without measures
designed to undermine the Act,
Obama's signature healthcare reform.
However in a sign of
the disarray that has affected an apparently directionless Capitol Hill,
interest in that proposal lasted no more than a few hours.
 Furloughed federal employees attend a protest outside the US
Capitol to demand an end of federal workers' lockout after the shutdown.
Photograph: Xinhua /Landov / Barcroft Media
The risk of a possible US default – which most economists
agree would be catastrophic and reverberate across the world – has
concentrated minds on Capitol Hill. Some Repulbicans have become increasligly
concerned that they are being blamed for the crisis. They hoped that by focusing
on the unpopularity of Obamacare and characterising the president's stance as
a refusal to negotiate, that the White House would be seen as responsible for
the first shutdown since 1996.
But an NBC News/Wall
Street Journal poll this
week showed the public largely blaming Republicans, with the party suffering
its all-time worst rating since the began.
Support for Obama's health reforms, which were introduced on the day the
shutdown began, has increased despite early problems with enrolment websites.
Procedural complications
There appears to be
little prospect of a deal before markets opened on Monday. All eyes are now
on a deadline of Thursday when, according to the Treasury, the $16.7tn debt
limit must be raised in order for the US to continue paying its creditors.
Even if a deal between Reid and McConnell is reached over the next 24 hours,
procedural complications mean a vote might not be taken until Wednesday or
even Thursday, a senior congressional aide said.
Republican members of the House gathered for a private meeting
with the speaker, John Boehner, on Saturday
morning. The Republican leader informed his fellow representatives that
discussions with the president had not yielded any prospect of a deal.
"The president rejected our deal," said the Idaho representative
Raul Labrador, immediately after the meeting. "It is now up to the
Senate Republicans to hold firm." Representative Thomas Massey, of
Kentucky, added: "We made an offer to the president and he turned it
down. He's still refusing to negotiate – the president is refusing to offer
anything."
 House Speaker John Boehner leaves a Republican conference in
the US Capitol on Saturday. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
Obama
has repeatedly said he will not be taken "hostage" by House
Republicans, and will only enter into formal negotiations once they remove
the treat of a US default and reopen the government. Speaking in
his weekly address, on Saturday morning, Obama said he was against
any stop-gap measures which would buy time but still leave the country under
the shadow of a possible default.
"It wouldn't be
wise, as some suggest, to just kick the debt ceiling can down the road for a
couple months, and flirt with a first-ever intentional default right in the
middle of the holiday shopping season," he said.
Even if a deal is
reached between Reid and McConnell, with backing from the White House, the
challenge will lie in securing the support of the Republican-dominated House
of Representatives. Republican leaders now appear to have all but given up
their initial efforts to defund Obamacare, or delay the "individual
mandate" of Obamacare, which compels US citizens to obtain healthcare or
face fines.
They now appear to be
seeking some kind of concession that will justify a course of action that
resulted in an initial 800,000 government workers being furloughed, or
temporarily suspended from work, and damaged local economies across the
country which are dependent upon federal funds.
The shutdown, now entering its 13th day, has laid bare the
bitter divisions in the Republican Party. What began as classic congressional
deadlock between a Republican-dominated House and a Democratic-controlled
Senate has become an internecine dispute between the Tea Party movement and more moderate Republicans.
 The Statue of Liberty will reopen to the public after the
state of New York agreed to shoulder the costs of running the site during the
federal government shutdown. Photograph: John Minchillo/AP
Its
impact has been felt most acutely in Washington, where there is a
concentration of employees of federal agencies and departments. At least
500,000 government workers are still thought to be furloughed. But across
America federal outposts have also felt the squeeze, particularly in the many
rural, local economies dependant upon national parks. One of the worst
affected area is in the rural North
Carolina district which elected Tea Party Republican congressman Mark Meadows.
He was described as
the "architect" of the shutdown after orchestrating a petition
among House Republican members to force the leadership to use the federal
budget as leverage to undermine Obamacare.
Meadows denied he was
particularly instrumental in starting the shutdown, telling the Guardian that
he was striving to reopen the government for his constituents, many of whom
are reliant on tourism from nearby national parks. "Honestly, if they're
angry with me, I'm doing all I can to get the government back open and make
sure the harmful affects don't hurt people back home."
Under a deal agreed
reached late on Friday, the Statue of Liberty, Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore
as well as some national parks in Colorado and Utah reopened this weekend,
after the government allowed them to be temporarily funded by state money and
other non-federal sources.
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