GOP retools plan as Congress seeks debt fix

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it’s time for Republicans to “face facts” and agree on a compromise plan to raise the U.S. debt ceiling.

“We’re running out of time,” Reid said at a news conference today in Washington with other Senate Democratic leaders. Reid said his plan to trim spending over 10 years is the only one with “true compromise,” and it can be modified by “tweaking” in the wake of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s finding that it would save only $2.2 trillion instead of the $2.7 trillion he had advertised.

House Democrats, for their part, said Obama should invoke a little-known constitutional provision to prevent the nation from going into default if Congress fails to come up with a plan to raise the debt ceiling.

Rep. James Clyburn, a member of the Democratic leadership, said he told fellow Democrats on Wednesday that Obama should both veto the House GOP plan for a short-term extension of the debt ceiling and invoke the 14th amendment, which says that the validity of the nation’s public debt “shall not be questioned.”

The White House has rejected resorting to this tactic to keep the nation from defaulting. But Democratic Caucus chairman John Larson said that with only days left before Treasury’s borrowing authority lapses, “we have to have a failsafe mechanism.”

Amid all the heated rhetoric, the differences between the sides were narrowing.

Boehner’s plan represents significant movement from a bill the House passed last week, this one requiring less of the long-term spending cuts that had made Democrats balk. And Reid no longer is insisting on having tax increases, anathema to Republicans, as part of any plan to cut deficits.

Boehner needs to do more than pump up the legislation, however. He has to shore up his standing with tea party-backed conservatives demanding deeper spending cuts to accompany an almost $1 trillion increase in the government’s borrowing cap. Many conservatives already had promised to oppose it.

Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., said he remained undecided, but predicted that the reworked Boehner plan was “about as good as it’s going to get. That’s a pretty strong argument.”

“It’s much less than I would like,” said Rep. John Fleming, R-La., but he said he doubted Republicans would get the spending cuts they want “until we get a new president. So I’m willing to take something less than I would otherwise.