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Politco...
Winners and losers in
the shutdown showdown
By Meredith Shiner
4/9/11
Government workers aren’t going to miss a paycheck after all. Tax
refunds will arrive on schedule. And the Cherry Blossom Festival in
Washington is full speed ahead.
But now that the government has kept its doors open, the mics around
the Capitol have gone quiet after weeks of political posturing to “win”
the debate, and the details of the budget deal are out, the winners and
losers of the shutdown showdown 2011 have emerged.
Just because a compromise was struck in the 11th hour — literally — and
a shutdown averted, does not mean everyone walked away on top. Here’s
POLITICO’s take on the real winners and losers.
Winners
The men behind the deal: Barry Jackson, David Krone and Rob Nabors
With an hour and half before government shutdown, it wasn’t Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker John Boehner and President
Barack Obama who shook hands to seal what the majority leader later
called an “historic” agreement. It was their top liaisons who shook
hands first, tucked away in a room on the fourth floor of the Capitol.
It was a fitting end to a tortuous weeks-long negotiations process for
Reid Chief of Staff Krone, Boehner Chief of Staff Jackson and White
House legislative director Nabors — the men who continued to hammer
away at an agreement, even as their bosses publicly traded jabs.
Friday night, Boehner began briefing his caucus in the Capitol basement
at 9:45 p.m. without a final deal in his hands. Four floors above, the
three top staffers were facing what one person in the room described as
the “now or never” moment. By 10:30 p.m., the three surrogates shook
hands on the deal. Within moments, both Krone and Nabors received phone
calls from their respective bosses, “wanting to know what the hell was
going on,” according to a top Senate leadership aide. Reid and the
president didn’t know a deal had been made, and for the first time in
weeks, Krone and Nabors had the answer to that question their bosses
wanted to hear. It’s done.
It also was Jackson and Krone who ultimately struck the deal on Title
X, the family planning policy rider that almost sunk the negotiations.
Reid had pitched the idea of holding a separate vote on the measure to
Boehner in the Oval Office, where the Republican rebuffed the offer in
front of the president. Jackson later called Krone suggesting the vote
as a framework. Krone convinced his boss to take the deal.
“I never met him until we started this,” Reid said of Jackson on the
Senate in the waning hours of Friday night. “But he is a real
professional. It’s been very difficult to work through all this stuff,
but I admire his professionalism.”
Speaker John Boehner
(R-Ohio)
Boehner may have been outnumbered by Democrats at the table 2-to-1, but
by the way the final deal shaped up, you wouldn’t know it. The Speaker
got $38.5 billion dollars in cuts, including $2 billion in a short-term
stopgap measure running through Thursday as staffers put the finishing
touches on his long-term deal. Boehner also forced the Senate to hold
votes on Title X family planning funds and on defunding President
Obama’s health care reform law. And then there’s the DC school vouchers
program — a pet cause of the speaker — which was reinstated in the deal.
Perhaps more important, Boehner proved he can keep his caucus mostly in
line when it counts. For weeks Democrats said the tea party-wing of
Boehner’s conference was pushing negotiations toward a shutdown, by
demanding deeper and deeper cuts. With a shutdown averted, Boehner
cleared a key hurdle. Though it doesn’t mean the road ahead with a
final vote on the long-term deal will be without bumps.
Plus, by pressing to get the most bang for his buck in these spending
negotiations, he will have a better case to make to even the most
passionate tea party lawmakers when the even more important debt limit
vote comes sometime before mid-May. An 11th hour vote on raising the
nation’s debt ceiling, or failure to do so, has serious consequences
for the global economy as the threat of American default is much more
serious than government shutdown. Now, Boehner can go to his caucus and
leverage, ‘Remember when I got all those extra cuts for you by putting
Democrats on the ropes’ into support.
Read the rest of the story at Politico
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