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Debt deadline may provide another Mitch McConnell moment (Paul Kane, July 30, 2011, Washington Post)

On Saturday, after all the partisan bills were doomed and dismissed, the Senate minority leader took charge of the process, reaching out to the White House to demand that President Obama get personally involved. Any debt-ceiling deal before the Tuesday default deadline, McConnell said, would require direct engagement with the president -- and late Saturday, the approach seemed the last, best hope.

"In the category of getting serious, I have spoken to both the president and the vice president within the last hour," McConnell (R-Ky.) said. "We are now fully engaged, the speaker and I, with the one person in America out of 307 million people who can sign a bill into law."

After returning to the Senate from a White House meeting, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) accused McConnell of not negotiating in "good faith" and holding "meaningless press conferences" in which he claims to be engaged. Reid said other members of the Republican Conference were truly talking and McConnell was just stalling.

"I guess talking is a step in the right direction, but that's about it," Reid said.

A smiling McConnell interrupted Reid to inform him that he had just "cut short a conversation with the vice president" to come to the Senate floor for an "important vote" on a quorum -- essentially an attendance-taking vote -- that Reid had called.

It may have been predictable that it would come to this. McConnell's fingerprints are on every big bipartisan deal and every key spending bill to emerge from the Congress in recent years. He secretly negotiated, with Vice President Biden, the deal to extend the George W. Bush-era tax cuts last December. And three years ago, in an environment eerily similar to the current stalemate, it was McConnell who helped rescue a bailout package for the financial services industry from a humiliating defeat on the House floor.

...could agree to the deal that congressional Democrats worked out with Republicans but cut the Democrats out of it.

Posted by oj at July 31, 2011 10:47 AM
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