Las Vegas Sun

By Karoun Demirjian

Thu, Apr 7, 2011 (6:11 p.m.)

Another day, another set of meetings, another bill -- but with less than 30 hours to go, there was still no resolution.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner are huddling with the president for one more meeting tonight to try to hash out the particulars of an agreement. It’s almost do-or-die, considering they have to leave enough time for lawmakers to reconvene Friday and pass whatever resolution they might come up with.

In the meantime, Democrats are blaming Republicans, and Republicans are blaming Democrats for the possible government shutdown. But if it actually happens Friday, maybe neither group of congressional lawmakers is to blame.

The House voted Thursday afternoon to approve a short-term budget measure that would pay for one more week of negotiations -- and cover the Defense Department’s budget through the end of the year. It wasn’t completely along party lines either: six of the Republicans’ most die-hard Tea Party champions broke party rank to oppose the bill, and 15 Democrats decided to support it, for a final vote of 247-181. Nevadans stayed safely within their party lines.

The bill isn’t expected to come up in the Senate, where Reid called it a “non-starter” this morning. But he’s also been very careful to articulate that it’s the president who doesn’t want to wait around any longer -- a point the White House emphasized with a veto threat this week

While a week’s stay would buy the leaders more negotiating time, it’s looking more and more like the sticking points aren’t a matter of policy -- they’re political.

The negotiations have stymied over whether to fund Planned Parenthood and whether to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its regulatory powers over climate change.

One road to a deal could be to try to address those issues separately. That appeared to be what Democrats in the Senate were trying to orchestrate yesterday, through a series of amendments to the small business innovation bill that sought to chip away at the EPA’s authority in various ways. None passed, though -- and the next morning, Reid claimed the EPA funding was still one of the main sticking points.

“We will not solve in one night disagreements this country has been having for 40 years,” Reid said. “That is not realistic. Right now, we have to be realistic.”

It’s not just the politics of the policy riders. Boehner is straddling an uncomfortable divide between the Tea Party members of his caucus, who have been leading a public airwaves campaign deriding Democrats for holding up the budget process, but haven’t been reliably forthcoming with their votes when it comes to backing up the speaker.

Three weeks ago, several House Republicans broke away from Boehner to vote against a three-week stopgap measure -- Nevada’s Dean Heller among them. On Thursday, the holdouts were limited to only the six most dogged Tea Party supporters.

But the Tea Party, which came to Washington to lobby this week, isn’t shying away from a shutdown; in fact, some are calling for it.

Self-appointed Tea Party leader Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota was among those lawmakers trying to rally the crowds, but tamp down their cheers of “shut it down, shut it down,” for fear the movement, and Republicans by extension, would get blamed if the government did actually shut down.

Leaders are expected to settle somewhere between the $73 billion figure (off the president’s fiscal 2011 request, which is $33 billion off current spending levels) that lawmakers fleetingly appeared to agree upon late last week, and $80 billion that Boehner demanded a few days ago. Both are close in keeping with what Republicans had initially demanded the government trim by, before Tea Party conservatives insisted on the $100 billion figure that appeared in H.R. 1.

Though he’s not admitted to it publicly, the numbers emerging from these negotiation meetings suggest Boehner has abandoned the Tea Party’s figures. So the only potential political victory that might be left to the Tea Party wing of the party at this point is a temporary shutdown -- and it appears the Tea Party needs to be able to claim some sort of victory, on its own terms, if it's to remain comfortably behind Boehner as leader.

The pure politics don’t seem to be working. Several Tea Party freshmen signed a letter this week demanding Reid either pass a budget bill (conceivably H.R. 1) or step down as Senate majority leader for shirking his duty.

It didn’t seem to work. Polls -- and even Boehner -- suggest that if anyone is going to win the messaging war in the case of a shutdown, it’s probably the Democrats.

That wave didn’t scoop up all freshmen who enjoyed Tea Party support during the 2010 elections, however. Nevada Rep. Joe Heck has made a point of trying to keep his head above the political tide, he says: He did not, for example, sign that letter demanding Reid step down.

“We want to keep government functioning, we want to control spending -- there’s got to be a way to support both of those goals. I’m trying to stay above the fray, and not point fingers,” Heck said.

When it comes to the negotiations, he’s backing Boehner’s proposals all the way -- but seems to be angling toward the leader taking a deal.

“I support the bill as it came out of the appropriations committee, before the riders were attached,” he said, when asked whether he thought the provisions that are currently proving to be sticking points for the negotiators were vital to the substance of the bill. “I believe that the most important thing we need to do is keep the government open, followed by cutting spending.”

That stance -- if multiplied across the party -- suggests there’s ample room to strike an agreement between Republicans and Democrats.

Nevada House Reps. Shelley Berkley and Dean Heller also say they don’t want to see a shutdown happen -- but have flipped positions on whether they think the time is up for continued negotiations.

Three weeks ago, it was Berkley who voted to extend the budget negotiations under a stopgap measure, and Heller who refused, saying too much time had already been wasted. On Thursday however, Heller voted for the Republicans’ one-week plus full-fiscal year defense department package, while Berkley sided with the Democrats saying enough is enough.

“Our troops come first,” Heller said. “In the absence of a funding agreement, this measure is a necessary step to ensure our troops have the resources they need.”

Berkley however, phrased the debate thus far in different terms -- and ones likely to resonate at home.

“Republicans are saying they will shut down the government and punish Americans over half of what they’re willing to spend on a nuclear garbage dump Nevadans have rejected for decades,” Berkley said, calling up the example of Yucca mountain, which H.R. 1 keeps open and is expected to cost the government somewhere in the neighborhood of $90 to 100 billion, to serve as a point of reference for the $33-to-40 billion that lawmakers are currently mired in gridlock over.

“This is absolute hypocrisy at its worst,” she said.

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