WASHINGTON — At one crucial moment in the game of chicken over a looming shutdown of the United States government, President Obama and the House speaker, John A. Boehner, faced off in the Oval Office. Mr. Boehner, a Republican heavily outnumbered in the room by Democrats, was demanding a provision to restrict financing to Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions. Mr. Obama would not budge.
“Nope. Zero,” the president said to the speaker. Mr. Boehner tried again. “Nope. Zero,” Mr. Obama repeated. “John, this is it.” A long silence followed, said one participant in the meeting. “It was just like an awkward, ‘O.K., well, what do you do now?’ ”
That meeting broke without an agreement. But while Mr. Obama may have held tough on the abortion provision, he and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, had already made a broader concession — agreeing to tens of billions of dollars in spending cuts that would have been unthinkable had Republicans not captured control of the House from Democrats in midterm elections last year.
For Mr. Boehner, the deal represents an early showcase of negotiating prowess, and an ability to balance the clamor of staunch conservatives in his party, who have little desire to compromise with Democrats, with the political imperative of securing real accomplishments. Even some Democrats said that in a deeply divided Washington, Mr. Boehner’s negotiations over this past chaotic week harked back to a time when party leaders were more willing to give ground and do business with each other.
“I don’t like his legislation, but I like the way he is running the House,” Mr. Reid said in an interview Saturday.
Though Mr. Boehner won significant ground and the applause of his caucus, his approach this week — like Mr. Obama’s — carries the risk that some will view him as too conciliatory, as illustrated by the 54 Republicans who voted against an earlier temporary spending bill, forcing the speaker to rely on votes from Democrats to get it through.
Both sides are declaring some victories, and details of the full impact of the cuts have yet to emerge. But interviews with White House and Congressional officials involved in the tense negotiations show just how down to the wire things got, and how up until virtually the last minute, officials at the highest levels were uncertain that they could prevent a remarkable shuttering of the government during wartime and a fragile economic recovery.
In the end, with the clock ticking toward a midnight Friday deadline, the White House sessions and the flurry of telephone calls between the president and the speaker gave way to a meeting of little-known aides at the Capitol, where a tentative deal was clinched Friday evening on roughly $38 billion in reductions for the balance of this fiscal year. That amounts to what the president himself acknowledged would be “the biggest annual spending cut in history.”
Several times White House and Democratic Congressional officials said they believed they had a deal; several times they were wrong. Republican officials said they were clear all along that nothing was set in stone until everything was agreed upon. On Friday afternoon, with television networks presenting clocks ticking down the minutes, an aide began setting up for a news conference in the White House Blue Room. Reporters and photographers were sequestered there, with hints that an announcement was imminent. They were there for six hours, as negotiations continued and the deal at times seemed as if it might fall apart.
In all, during the last four days of the budget showdown, Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner spent more time with each other — in person and on the phone — than they had during the entire course of Mr. Obama’s presidency.
Their first White House meeting of the week took place Tuesday, but it ran aground.
After returning from giving a speech in New York the following day, Mr. Obama met again with Mr. Boehner and Mr. Reid. The two sides were closer, but the “riders” — policy changes like the Planned Parenthood funding change — were now on the table.
Mr. Obama asked that they go through the riders one by one. A White House aide, Rob Nabors, dashed out of the Oval Office with a stack of 40 riders, and headed to a Xerox machine, “while the rest of us sat around waiting for the copies,” a senior White House official said. Mr. Boehner even joked at one point, chiding Mr. Obama about how he might want to find faster copier machines, prompting the president to mime cranking out a mimeograph.
During the frantic final 12 hours Friday, Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner were on the phone four times. The most pivotal came at 11:15 a.m.
The night before, during a 90-minute meeting at the White House, Mr. Obama believed that he had made a breakthrough in the negotiations, when he told Mr. Boehner that he would sign on to spending cuts of roughly $38 billion — $5 billion more than he had offered two days earlier.
This was a major concession. But the offer was contingent on two things: that some of the additional cuts would come from areas that Mr. Obama had already indicated he was willing to do without, and that Mr. Boehner understood that Democrats would never agree to cutting federal funds for family planning programs.
Mr. Boehner, White House officials say, agreed to the money part, leading them to believe that a breakthrough had been reached. And the two men sent their negotiators to Mr. Boehner’s office on Capitol Hill to hammer out the details. But by 3 a.m., it was clear that what White House aides believed had happened in the Oval Office was not agreed upon by all sides, prompting White House officials to write a formal offer that they believed reflected the understanding they believed they had reached.
Later Friday morning, the reply came from Mr. Boehner, “north of the amount we’d offered the night before,” a senior administration official said.
An angry Mr. Obama called Mr. Boehner at 11:15. “He just thought things were going off the rails,” said one White House official. (Mr. Boehner would later point to the president’s anger in private meetings with his allies, using it as evidence that he was taking a tough line.)
That conversation, Mr. Obama’s aides said, lasted five minutes: “The president said, ‘I’m the president of the United States, you’re the speaker of the House,’ ” one senior White House official recalled, offering the White House’s view of events. “He said: ‘We’re the two most responsible leaders right now. We had a conversation last night, and what I’m hearing now doesn’t reflect that.’ ”
David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the president, called the phone exchange the “diciest time” in the talks, adding that Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner had a “frank and honest discussion that got things back on track.”
Congressional Republican aides said the White House voiced frustration at several points about the pace of negotiations, and credited Mr. Reid’s office with pushing back against efforts to set deadlines other than the only one that mattered.
As some White House aides were preparing to be furloughed at midnight, others were working on the final terms of a deal.
And by evening, with a shutdown just hours away, Congressional aides said they had finally secured a tentative agreement.
Still, after 8 p.m., House Republicans at the Capitol were looking to rework some details. Charles Houy, the Democratic staff director of the Senate Appropriations Committee, arrived alone, carrying a pad. “We’re not going to do this,” Mr. Houy told his House Republican colleagues. “Look at the time. It’s now or never folks.”
Mr. Boehner went into a 9:45 p.m. meeting with his restive caucus, in the Capitol basement, and began selling the deal, while his chief of staff, Barry Jackson; Mr. Reid’s chief of staff, David Krone; and Mr. Nabors, the president’s top Congressional liaison, in an office four floors above, shook hands on a final agreement.
The speaker faced an audience of rank-and-file lawmakers, who had picked up Cheez-It crackers, Nutter Butter cookies, soda and other snacks on the way in.
After laying out the details, Mr. Boehner was greeted with applause from his colleagues, many of whom quickly declared victory.
It was now pushing 10:30 p.m. and at nearly the same moment Mr. Krone’s and Mr. Nabors’s phones buzzed with calls from their bosses — “both of them wanting to know what the hell was going on,” according to a senior official who was present.
What was going on was the end of a long, complicated, high-pressure standoff that in the end was just a preview of even fiercer fights to come as the White House and Congressional Republicans turn to battling over the full-year budget for 2012.
House Republicans were forced to drop many policy demands from the short-term budget bill, though they are likely to re-emerge in the coming months. But in addition to the big spending cuts, they won several points, including a limited restriction on the use of local taxpayer funds for abortion in Washington, D.C., and the reinstatement of a school voucher program in the capital, a personal priority of Mr. Boehner.
“By my math, it’s about 79 percent of what we wanted,” said Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the Budget Committee and architect of the Republicans’ longer-term fiscal proposal, which includes more than $4 trillion in reductions. Mr. Ryan’s aggressive budget proposal earlier in the week helped soothe some of the most combative Republican freshmen by reminding them that the more consequential fiscal negotiations lie ahead.
It remains to be seen whether the time the president and the speaker spent together will translate into an ability to work through even more difficult deficit and debt fights ahead.
“A very important predicate has been made here that the speaker, the president, the vice president and the Senate majority leader can do business together,” Mr. Plouffe said. “The trust was increased. The knowledge was increased.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Sunday, April 10th 2011 at 5:55PM
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