Senate Leaders apparently reached a deal late last night, staff are working out technical details and the plan is to brief their respective caucuses today. They should be able to pass this in the Senate today or tomorrow. The House situation remains the same with at this point no real way out except for House Leadership to bring up the Senate bill. Boehner is apparently 20-30 votes short in his caucus and has the options of either putting the Senate bill on the floor and taking Democratic votes to get it done; continuing to “fight” to get those 20-30 members to support something or letting the government remain closed, let the country default and fight again.
There is no guarantee of any of these plans going forward – yesterday afternoon Boehner thought he had a plan forward in the Conference meeting however when they left those same 20-30 conservative, mainly Freshmen members, left the meeting still wanting the subsidy for federal employees to cover ACA costs repealed and wouldn’t vote for the House bill if that wasn’t in there. Add on top of that the grassroots organizations of the conservative think tanks Heritage Foundation and Freedom Works came out against the House Leadership bill Tuesday afternoon. That only added fuel to the fire he is trying to manage. Politico reported it right. The GOP conference is like a water balloon – squeeze it in one place and a problem pops out somewhere else – I’m adding the water balloon part because you don’t know if it will pop or not.
The only way out I see at this point is for Boehner to risk the political wrath of the conservative faction of his party and move the Senate compromise with the support of Democrats. He doesn’t have a lot of time at this point to do this as tomorrow is “D-day” with the Debt Ceiling and it’s not likely this will happen quickly as the leader of these 20-30 members Senator Cruz will likely use procedural tactics to slow this down again.
Bottom line is it’s likely this gets TEMPORARILY settled in the next few days – and it is likely we come back to address this again mid-December and again in January.