(Biden photo: White House)
Jake Tapper:
Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have been talking privately about a possible way forward should Boehner's bill fail in the Senate, which seems likely, according to sources familiar with the talks.
The plan being discussed by Biden and McConnell would likely be some compromise between the House Speaker John Boehner's bill that would raise the debt ceiling for six months and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's, which would raise it through the beginning of 2013. Their two proposals each seem doomed to fail in the other's chamber.
First, memo to House Republicans: Even before Boehner's bill has come up for a vote, Mitch McConnell (who has already tried to cave), is negotiating with the White House to weaken your bill.
Second, memo to the White House and Congressional Democrats: If you can get Mitch McConnell to cave all over again, more power to you. But if you think that there's some sort of reasonable "middle-ground" between Boehner's proposal and Reid's proposal, you're crazy.
Boehner's plan isn't awful because it raises the debt limit in two stages, it's awful because it requires Congress to cut somewhere between $1.6 and $1.8 trillion from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid within the next six months. Other than that requirement—which I think is significant—it's basically the same thing as the Reid bill.
On every single other point, the Reid bill already represents a compromise: it has deep spending cuts, it doesn't include any new revenues, it even creates a deficit reduction committee which could in theory cut entitlements (though there is no requirement for that Congress to enact that committees plan). To compromise with the Boehner bill would require accepting some sort of a trigger to force major entitlement cuts, and that would be a monumental mistake.