WASHINGTON POST
The House took its first step to avert a government shutdown as President Obama began a series of rare meetings with Republican lawmakers on Wednesday, reviving chances for a long-term deal to reduce the federal deficit.
In hopes of avoiding a crisis this month, the House approved a six-month spending bill that would fund the government through the end of the fiscal year. The measure passed 267 to 151, with most Republicans supporting it and most Democrats voting against it.
The stopgap measure would provide $982 billion, enough to keep federal agencies humming past March 27, when current funding will expire. It also would lock in the across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester for the rest of the fiscal year.
The bill will now head to the Senate, where Democrats are likely to seek amendments that would help blunt the effects of domestic spending cuts that began last week. But there is bipartisan optimism that a final version of the measure will clear Congress by the end of the month.
With a government shutdown now unlikely, Obama is focusing on a new round of talks that the White House hopes could break the fiscal impasse. After more than two years of negotiations with GOP leaders that did not achieve a “grand bargain,” the president is courting rank-and-file Republicans who may be interested in a deal that pairs cuts in entitlement programs with a tax overhaul that would include new revenue.
Obama’s new charm offensive marks a departure from his more combative recent negotiating style. Since winning reelection in November, he has pursued an outside strategy of rallying the public to ratchet up pressure on lawmakers to back his proposals.
Now, however, with the sequester cuts taking hold, White House aides said Obama sees an opportunity for productive discussions with Republicans about how to replace the sequester with a more thoughtful and less painful deficit-reduction plan.
Aides say Obama accepts that the sequester cuts are here, for now at least. But he wants to replace them quickly with a deal that includes overhauling entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security in exchange for raising $600 billion in new revenue by rewriting the tax code.
Entitlements were shielded from the sequester, which was designed to hit year after year for the next decade and total $1.2 trillion in cuts. As it continues, domestic and military programs will be hit hardest.
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Next, the House and the Senate will put forward competing — and probably starkly different — budget plans that will lay out tax and spending priorities for years to come.
Obama’s new outreach is a strategy for avoiding another crisis in the summer, when the nation will again bump up against a federal borrowing limit. Instead of initiating negotiations with House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio), the president is sidestepping GOP leaders and approaching Republicans one by one.
Former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.), a Democrat close to Obama, said: “There is no substitute for personal engagement. It creates avenues of communication that lead to opportunities for cooperation. And when that happens, one builds trust and deals get done.”
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NY TIMES JACKIE CALMES
For Washington-watchers looking for positive signs from President Obama’s unusual dinner with Republican senators on Wednesday night, there was this: Senators John McCain of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma each gave waiting reporters a thumbs up as lawmakers exited the private dining room.
Perhaps their gesture merely expressed gratitude that the president had picked up the tab – out of his own pocket – for the gathering he initiated at the tony Jefferson Hotel, just blocks from the White House and across Lafayette Park.
But given the near blackout on information and the security cordon surrounding the hotel, Washington will be digging for days for more substantive reports about what – if anything – the supper might mean for progress on the budget, immigration, gun safety or any other issue central to Mr. Obama’s second-term agenda.
At the outset of his new term, the president seems to have initiated a period of engagement with Senate Republicans to counter the paralyzing antipathy toward him in the Republican-controlled House. In recent days, he invited about a dozen senators to dinner. And next week, at his request, he will go to Capitol Hill to separately meet with both parties in both the House and Senate.
The official guest list of those who dined with Mr. Obama was forthcoming from the White House only after everyone had left the roughly two-hour get-together, given the Obama circle’s sensitivity to the fact that identification with the Democratic president carries a political risk for many Republicans back home.
(Proof of that: the influential conservative activist Erick Erickson on Wednesday night circulated on his Twitter account another conservative’s Twitter warning: “Seriously, if you are a senator up for re-election in ’14, the smartest thing you can do right now is BAIL on the Obamadinner.”)
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Americans broadly support an across-the-board cut in spending for a government often seen as wasteful, but there is wide opposition to blanket cuts to the military, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Some 55 percent of liberal Democrats also back the eight percent slashing of the U.S. military budget included in the sequester. Republicans overwhelmingly oppose such cuts to defense.
The large support for cutting government spending stands in stark contrast deep public opposition to decreasing spending on particular programs. In February the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans on 19 areas of federal spending, and there was majority support for decreasing spending in precisely zero of them. (See also Huffpost Pollster’s write-up of the cuts paradox.)
In short: the American public likes the idea of cutting federal spending; what they don’t like are actual cuts in federal spending.
That paradox makes it very difficult for elected officials to navigate the issue of whether — and what — to cut.
The lack of clarity in public opinion makes the way forward in Washington on the issue less than clear. If progress is to be made, it will require politicians to do a bit of a high-wire act without a net — choosing what specifically to cut without knowing whether the public supports their moves. Will they do it? Count us as skeptical.