GOP Has Yet To Bring 'Something – Anything – New' To Budget Stalemate, Senate Leader Charges

With the clock ticking with just days before the federal government faces its first shutdown in more than a decade, Democrats and Republicans remain divided not only in the dollar amount of their budget cuts, but also in a "willingness to compromise," according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Lawmakers of both parties have only until Friday to agree on levels of federal spending before most of the government will have to close.

House Republicans are insisting on budget cuts deeper than what President Obama and Senate Democrats have been willing to accept.

GOP House Speaker John Boehner has proposed a new short-term spending bill to keep the government open for three additional weeks, but key Republicans on his right flank object to that approach.

The House last month approved a bill which would fund federal operations through September, but at a cost of pruning tens of billions from a swath of domestic programs.

The Senate last week rejected both the House bill, and an alternative put up by Democrats.

“Democrats have made it crystal clear that we’re determined to pass a budget. We recognize the reality that one party alone will not reach a resolution without the other’s cooperation and consent,” says Reid (D-Nev.). “We’ve accepted and acknowledged that we need to share the sacrifice. Democrats are willing to find reasonable ways to do that, and we have offered necessary cuts that will strengthen our future rather than weaken it.

“But we are still waiting for Republicans to do the same. They are pretending last week’s votes didn’t happen. They are covering their eyes and ears to the reality that their proposal – the short-sighted bill the Tea Party and the Republican House of Representatives continue to support – was roundly rejected here in the Senate,” he adds.

Republicans, Reid says, must give some ground.

“We’re still waiting for them to bring something – anything – new to the table. They haven’t done that yet,” he says. “Listen to the Republicans’ speeches and sound bites and you’ll hear no reasonable cuts, no serious offer, no willingness to compromise, no sense of shared responsibility. You’ll hear no new ideas.

“We can’t afford another week of these games. We cannot negotiate through the media and we cannot negotiate if one side is unwilling to give any ground.”


The last time the federal government was forced to shut down was in 1995 and 1996, also in a budget-cutting battle -- at that time between congressional Republicans and President Bill Clinton.

Current public opinion overwhelmingly favors compromise over a new potential shutdown.


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