The Senate & House bills are combined: There’s only a week left till the deadline, but – theoretically – if both chambers end their game of chicken and pass their own bills by the end of the week, House and Senate leaders could go through a quick conference process to reconcile their differences. There are many similarities between the two bills and the two chambers could bang out a compromise over the weekend and ram it through both chambers before the deadline. The likelihood of the bills passing, the leaders getting along and both chambers passing a new version in time is not good. But, it’s still a distant possibility.
The Grand Bargain comes back: Sure, Obama and Boehner twice tried to take the political leap on a grand bargain of $4+ trillion in cuts. And they got really, really close. Boehner said on Fox News Sunday that his final offer still remains on the table. And, frankly, the calculus that got both of them interested in a grand bargain remains the same: the political cost of doing something small is similar to the cost of doing something big, so they might as well go big. If Boehner’s bill fails to launch in the House, he has all the more reason to go back to the negotiating table with the President, rather than swallow the Senate bill. And the President has said that the only circumstances under which he’d accept a short-term extension is if they were hammering out the details of a big deal. But, as Boehner also said on Fox on Sunday, it is “hard to put humpty dumpty back together again.” And after the grand bargain shattered twice – three times if you count House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s abandoning of Vice President Joe Biden’s deficit negotiations – there’s not a lot of trust left.
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