During negotiations on reopening the government, Republicans wanted cuts to the Tricare program, which provides health insurance to service members and veterans:
Later that night, in staff-level discussions, the sides began considering a trade. In exchange for further means-testing of Medicare benefits, as well as reform of federal workers' pensions and Tricare health benefits for veterans, House Republicans would give Democrats $100 billion in sequestration relief over two years and open the government that Monday.
That Huffington Post article is lengthy look at how Democrats handled the shutdown and debt ceiling crisis. There are several interesting insidery bits, and remarkably much of it is on the record. Some things had come out before, like Pres. Obama and Sen. Reid agreeing before the crisis came that they were going to hang tough and not negotiate over keeping the government open and avoiding default. However, at the risk it's just me that missed it, this is the first report that Republicans wanted to include Tricare cuts. Generally republican support for veterans starts and stops with trying to turn current service members into combat veterans, but even when they've felt brave enough to go after entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, they've left Tricare alone.
Seems like their willingness to after it should be a bigger story. Especially if Tricare is how you cover your medical bills.
That's just the bit that stood out in a long article with plenty to interest news junkies and political activists. The core was right at the top, where Obama and Reid had a long heart to heart, having followed separate strategies and cut separate deals with Republicans like a many of us guessed. Reid seems to have been as angry as us in the base over Obama's caves in the prior crises manufactured by Republicans, and Obama learned from the debacle of 2011, though he hadn't learned enough --- yet. He finally figured out this year that modern Republicans have no interest in governing, no interest in a "grand bargain", and the search for something they'd like and would agree to was pretty pointless. Reid, for all the criticism of weakness from much of the base (mostly unfair IMHO), did have the opposition figured out much earlier than Obama. This time though, they got on the same page and, when the crisis hit, stuck to the plan:
Barack Obama and Harry Reid needed to clear the air. The relationship between the president and the Senate majority leader had been deteriorating since 2011, with Reid losing respect for Obama's ability to negotiate with Republicans and Obama unsure if Reid had as much control over his Senate Democratic caucus as he liked to say.
So at the White House's invitation, the two met in the Oval Office on July 9, with no staff, to talk one on one. It was a cathartic moment, one in which long-buried tensions were fully aired. Aides to the two men tell a similar story: Their boss had been losing confidence in his counterpart and wanted the meeting as a way to buck up the other.
Reid (D-Nev.) pressed the president hard on the 2011 debt ceiling compromise that the White House had cut with the GOP, which ultimately gave the country sequestration. He complained that Vice President Joe Biden had undercut fiscal cliff negotiations at the end of 2012, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was offered a more generous deal on tax revenue and sequester spending than Reid felt he could have crafted.
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Asked about the meeting the day after the 16-day government showdown was resolved, Reid acknowledged the disagreement over the 2011 debt ceiling strategy. Pausing for a few seconds, he reflected on how his relationship with the president has evolved.
"President Obama is such a nice man, just a nice person. And he became president during an awful time," Reid told HuffPost, measuring each word. "It is easy to look back and say, 'Oh, he shouldn't have done that, or he shouldn't have renewed the payroll tax.' That's all then, this is now. A different environment. I don't want to sound like a cheerleader for Obama. He can get others to do that. But he's a good person."
That July meeting ended up being just what the two needed. "That was good," Reid would tell his chief of staff, David Krone, who'd been waiting outside with top White House aide Rob Nabors. It helped lay the groundwork for what would be a critical -- and fruitful -- political partnership during the high-stakes budget fights this fall.
Each more mindful of the other's strategic vision, Reid and Obama made a mutual commitment to legislative stubbornness. A week after the meeting, Reid threatened to gut the filibuster if Republicans didn't let through a slate of executive nominees. Republicans caved. Looking forward, the two vowed to steadfastly oppose any effort to tinker with the president's health care law as part of a continuing resolution to keep the government running. And when it came time to raise the debt ceiling weeks later, they would refuse to negotiate altogether.
Through the first government shutdown in 17 years and a near-breach of the nation's debt limit, they followed this playbook until it ultimately resulted in a Republican collapse.
"We just both came to the conclusion that the time had ended to be taken in by these crazy people," Reid said. "The president said, 'I'm not going to negotiate.' I said, 'I'm not going to negotiate.' And we didn't."
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"The fact is that Senator Reid was more than a little upset in 2011 when the president and his team kept on trying against all odds to cut a deal on a so-called grand bargain," said Manley, Reid's former top spokesman. "But that was then and this is now … The interests of both Senator Reid and the president were perfectly in sync this time."
Obama and Reid, and Nancy Pelosi too (though my impression is she learned the folly of caving to Republicans a long time ago), had the self-awareness to realize Republicans had good reason to assume the Democrats were just posturing before making offers. The Republicans would take some convincing, and Democrats accepted that the shutdown would go on long enough to make it and the debt ceiling into one crisis.
In fact, the White House was so concerned with getting the message across that a meeting was called with McConnell, Reid, Boehner and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Oct. 2, after aides privately heard from reporters that Republicans thought the president was bluffing. During that session, the president assured the speaker that his intransigence was sincere. A sullen Boehner, leaving the meeting before anyone else, complained to the waiting press corps that Obama was being unreasonable.
"It was basically all of them saying over and over again that they were not going to negotiate," a top Republican House aide briefed on the meeting told The Huffington Post. "The speaker didn't have to say a whole lot."
By that point, both Hill Democrats and White House aides had grown convinced that the shutdown would last as long as it took to raise the debt limit. Boehner couldn't capitulate two times in three weeks, their theory went, so he would combine the two together.
During the crisis, I kept hoping Obama was refusing to use a unilateral way to avoid default just as a public position, but it looks like he meant it:
But concerns were creeping in that the standoff could actually lead to a debt default. The president was pressed by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to reconsider the so-called constitutional option, which would have him invoke the 14th Amendment as a way to unilaterally raise the debt limit. Obama called it unworkable. He then made light of a second escape-hatch proposal -- the idea that he could mint a trillion-dollar coin -- before reminding attendees that the Federal Reserve had ruled that one out, too. The Treasury Department had explored every creative option conceivable, he added, and some were better than others. But all of them were bad, and he was declining to talk about the possibilities in the hopes they could all be avoided.
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Behind the scenes, administration officials were pulling any lever they could. They called business leaders, Republican lobbyists and GOP wise men to solicit ideas on how to move Boehner. They pleaded with them to call Republican congressional offices as well. (Obama told the Senate Democrats that one CEO, who went unnamed, was refusing to return Boehner's calls, angry at his alliance with the tea party.) The president recognized that the GOP wanted what he called "a bloody shirt" in exchange for funding the government and raising the debt limit. But their demands were outlandish to the point of being laughable: At a meeting with House Democrats, Obama joked that the Republican ransom list was so long, the only thing it didn't include was his resignation. And even if the demands had been reasonable, he had resolved on principle not to meet them.
My criticism of how Democratic leaders, particularly the president, have handled prior crises, has been an inability to understand their opponent. In case there's lingering doubt that Reid, if not all the Democrats, finally understand the nature of their opposition,
"Oh, yeah," he [Reid] said when asked if there were moments he thought the country would hit the debt limit. "Oh, yes. Absolutely, absolutely. People were giving speeches that it wouldn't hurt anything. Of course there was worry. I was trying to be logical and rational dealing with illogical and irrational people. I was damned scared."
For all the times we've been frustrated with Democratic leadership being unable to figure out that Republicans don't believe in compromise, for expecting Republican moderates to mysteriously materialize, for refusing to use terms like "hostage taking" when even republicans spoke that way about their own actions, we should be pretty pleased. The president stood tough, both Democratic caucuses held together, the messaging was terrific, and they saw through the Republicans' demand to inflict long-term damage in exchange for a short-term end to a crisis. Finally, they realized these crises keep happening because Republicans see crises as their leverage.
Finally, they applied the hard lessons they'd learned instead of learning a new one.