WASHINGTON (AP) — Is Washington's backroom dealing dead?
House Speaker John Boehner says he no longer
wants to negotiate deficit reduction with President Barack Obama. The
president
says he won't negotiate raising the government's borrowing
authority. Rank and file lawmakers say they're tired of being left
out of the loop and insist on the regular legislative process.
If those are New Year's resolutions, they can certainly be broken. But at the start of a second presidential term, cutting
a secret, late night fiscal bargain with the White House on the phone and with a handshake suddenly seems so yesterday.
"No more brinkmanship," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell declared. "No more last-minute deals."
What's in, for the moment at least, is a more deliberative legislative process. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan,
last year's Republican vice presidential nominee, says it's all about "prudence."
For the nation, that could mean less
manufactured drama like the New Year's deal that averted the
once-dreaded "fiscal cliff."
For the stock market, it might mean less political volatility. And
for the economy, it could provide a dash of needed stability.
The reasons for this turn are fundamentally political.
Republicans are less interested in battling a
re-elected Obama, with his higher popularity ratings, than they are in
confronting
Senate Democrats. Last week's tactical retreat by House
Republicans from a clash over the nation's borrowing authority is
forcing the Senate's Democratic majority to assemble a budget,
making Democratic senators accountable for a series of specific
policies and clarifying differences between the parties ahead of
the 2014 midterm elections.
Unlike the emerging bipartisanship on an
overhaul of immigration laws, conflicts over budgets and deficits
frequently have
been resolved in a crisis atmosphere. And while immigration
changes have been pushed by a changing political landscape, issues
of spending and taxing define the core of both parties.
Republicans and the White House have tried
twice in two years to reach a "grand bargain" to reduce the long-term
deficit only
to settle for a smaller incremental deal. The process has tested
the relationship between Obama and Boehner and created tensions
for Boehner with his own Republican lawmakers. In the process,
lawmakers had to vote urgently on deals many had barely seen.
"Cooling your heels for 72 hours or 48 hours
while there's some backroom deal going on that cannot be discussed is
not exactly
why people ran for the Senate," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who
had unveiled his own 10-year, $4.5 trillion solution for
averting the end-of-year fiscal cliff.
What's more, Republican officials have
complained that Obama lectured congressional leaders during their
meetings, trying
to persuade rather than negotiate. White House officials, for
their part, complain that Boehner was an uncertain negotiator,
never able to guarantee that his party would stand by an
agreement.
As Boehner himself confessed last week in a
speech to the Republican Ripon Society: "The last two years have been
pretty rough."
He said newer Republicans lawmakers have come to think of him as
"some kind of a squish, ready to sell them out in a heartbeat."
"It really has in fact caused somewhat of breach that I've been in the middle of trying to repair," Boehner said.
While the fight over the government's
borrowing limit is now likely to be put off until May, Obama and the
Congress still
face two upcoming fiscal deadlines that could test this
unwillingness for 11th-hour White House negotiations. Tough new spending
cuts -- about $85 billion from this year's budget -- are scheduled
to kick in on March 1. On March 27, the government faces
a potential shutdown if Congress doesn't extend a temporary budget
measure.
But at the White House and in Congress, both
are seen as far less cataclysmic than failure to raise the nation's
debt ceiling.
And Republican lawmakers who once shuddered at the idea of massive
cuts, especially to defense programs, now see the automatic
reductions on March 1 as the only recourse to reduce spending.
"It's the bird in hand when it comes to cuts," said Sen. John Cornyn, the second ranking Republican leader in the Senate.
More unclear is how Republicans intend to deal with the debt ceiling in May, when Congress again will have to act to raise
it or extend it.
The White House is no more enthusiastic for last-minute deal making than Republicans are. Fiscal negotiations have been time
consuming events that have left Obama with little time to pursue other aspects of his agenda.
If freed from such talks, he can now push his proposals for overhauling immigration laws and combating gun violence.
"Going regular order slows things down and takes the president out of a central role but it's still an influential one if
he wants it," said Patrick Griffin, White House legislative director under President Bill Clinton. "The more it looks like
he's winning, the better the next battle goes for him."
What's more, White House officials say,
Obama's negotiating stance is now well known after he made a public
offer to Boehner
in December that Boehner turned down. That offer, White House
officials say, still stands: Lower cost-of-living adjustments
for Social Security recipients and other beneficiaries of
government programs, $400 billion in reduced spending in Medicare
and other health care programs over 10 years, and $600-$700
billion in tax revenue from closing loopholes and deductions by
rewriting the tax code.
In a memorandum to her colleagues, the new
Senate Budget Committee chair, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., emphasized
that "we
could raise hundreds of billions of dollars by making sure the
rich no longer benefit disproportionately from deductions and
other tax preferences." The letter did not specify an amount of
revenue. Republicans say any new tax revenue is out of the
question.
In 2014, there are 35 Senate seats up for election, 21 held by Democrats. Republicans see that as an opportunity to pick up
some seats and they see a clash over taxes as a winning proposition, especially in states Obama lost.
Moreover, a Democratic budget will test whether Democrats will embrace the Medicare cuts and Social Security changes that
Obama proposed privately in previous unsuccessful talks with Republicans.
"The president hasn't offered any of those
kinds of plans in public," Ryan said Sunday on Meet the Press. "They try
to do
back room deals, but those always seem to fall apart. We want to
have a debate in public so we can contrast these visions."
Associated Press White House Correspondent Julie Pace contributed to this article.