Unlike his Republican counterparts, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-NV) says he’ll make no ironclad demands in negotiations over raising the national debt limit. But he hinted that he favors an approach that’s at odds with Republican goals, and the stated goals of members of his own party.
“We’re not going to be drawing any lines in the sand,” he told reporters on a conference call Wednesday afternoon.
That suggests Dems have given up on the idea that they can force Republicans to raise the debt limit without attached measures aimed at reducing deficits, particularly by cutting spending. Reid says Congress will be able to mix and match ideas from a number of floating plans, including the House GOP budget, a forthcoming budget authored by Senate Budget Committee Kent Conrad, the bipartisan Gang of Six’s soon-to-be released deficit reduction plan, and the fiscal framework President Obama outlined in his deficit speech earlier this month.
“We have all these moving vehicles and through all this we’re going to have to come up with something that makes sense,” Reid said, noting that he favors a deficit cap — a ceiling on annual deficits, which, if exceeded, could automatically trigger a mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers to bring the budget closer to balance.
This is different, he noted, from a spending cap, which Republicans, and conservative Democrats have proposed, to either set dramatic spending cuts on a glide path, or to trigger automatic cuts in the event of higher-than-expected deficits, without considering tax increases of any kind.
Reid discussed some options at a previously undisclosed White House meeting yesterday.
“This is even bigger than the CR [the recent spending bill] that was so important,” Reid said. “That was shutting down the government. Increasing that ceiling is more important than that.”
