Bad Blood: Four feuding leaders

by John Bresnahan and Manu Raju, Politico, October 4, 2013.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid privately told fellow Democratic senators this week what he really thought of Speaker John Boehner.

“He’s a coward,” Reid angrily said, referring to Boehner’s private push for federal health care contributions for lawmakers and their staff. Boehner later backed legislation to end those subsidies in order to win points with House GOP conservatives. “He’s a coward!” Reid exclaimed.

Reid’s outburst — confirmed by several sources attending a Senate Democratic policy luncheon on Tuesday — is the latest example of how the relationship between the nation’s top political leaders is now brimming with acrimony, distrust and pettiness at a perilous time for the country’s economy. The government shutdown — the first in 17 years — is in its fourth day with no end in sight. With the Treasury Department saying it might not be able to borrow money as of Oct. 17, the U.S. and global financial markets are already starting to fret about what would happen if the country defaults on its $16.7 trillion debt.

The bad blood is making it harder for the two sides to trust each other in the increasingly bitter fight to reopen the government and keep the nation fiscally solvent.

Boehner, Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have more than a century of congressional service between them, as well as a string of legendary political and legislative wins and losses. Yet there are times when the “Big Four,” as the party leaders are referred to on Capitol Hill, seem more like long-bickering members of a city council rather than the leaders of a great nation.

Not only has the Reid-Boehner relationship sunk to a new low, but so have the once-collegial ties between Reid and McConnell.

Reid and Pelosi both think Boehner is more concerned about saving his own neck as speaker than doing the right thing for the country as he pushes proposals to defund or delay Obamacare, which almost certainly won’t happen with President Barack Obama sitting in the White House. According to Reid, Boehner promised to pass a clean continuing resolution last month but has now refused to do so, leading to the shutdown.

McConnell and Boehner, for their part, are convinced Reid helped provoke a shutdown in order to help his party politically next year. McConnell has increasingly suspected that Reid and his closest confidants have breached Senate protocol by engaging directly in the Democratic effort to defeat him in 2014. But even House GOP leaders privately question whether McConnell is too distracted by his own 2014 reelection campaign to be a full player in the current government-funding fight.

For Republicans, the frustration with Reid is palpable.

Asked to respond to Reid’s remarks calling the speaker a “coward,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said: “We have to work together if we’re going to get anything done, and all this bull—— — the name-calling, leaking private emails — just makes it harder to do the work the American people sent us here to do.”

Perhaps the only two leaders who have a productive bipartisan relationship these days are McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden — but both men are taking a back-seat role in the current government funding fight.

Indeed, that was evident at the White House meeting on Wednesday, sources said. Many in both parties believe that McConnell is unable to exert his influence because of his own reelection, but he strongly rejected those accusations at the closed-door session. And he won some support from Biden.

According to sources familiar with the matter, McConnell emphatically declared that his reelection campaign was not affecting how he was positioning himself in the shutdown fight. And McConnell pointedly disputed Reid’s public prediction that he would lose his campaign, instead declaring he would emerge victorious.

The one man who agreed with him was Biden — a former senator who brokered deals with McConnell in the past, who responded to McConnell’s outburst by saying that he hoped the Republican would be back next year, these sources said.

At the end of the session, McConnell walked out with Biden, as Boehner headed to the microphones to bash Democrats and Obama for refusing to negotiate.

But Reid dismissed suggestions Thursday that McConnell and Biden may need to take a larger role in the talks, as they did in the 2011 debt debate and the 2012 fiscal cliff fight.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Reid told POLITICO. “All we want is the government open, [and to] take care of the debt ceiling. We’ll talk about anything they want to talk about [after that]. I outlined everything. There isn’t anything we won’t talk about.”

But the personal animus extends beyond the leaders. Along with their bosses, aides to Boehner and Reid are in an undeclared war and neither is refusing to budge an inch.

Mike Sommers, Boehner’s chief of staff, described David Krone, Reid’s top aide, as “a snake” after Sommers’ emails were leaked detailing how the speaker secretly sought to protect federal contributions to staffers’ and lawmakers’ health insurance coverage. POLITICO reported the emails just as Boehner was pushing a House GOP bill to keep the government running in exchange for slashing those very same subsidies.

But Boehner is not blameless for the poisonous atmosphere, either. Back in December, as he and Reid were waiting outside the Oval Office to meet with Obama during the fiscal cliff,Boehner cursed several times at Reid.

Lawmakers in both party are certainly aware of the toxic relationship between congressional leaders.

“Do personal attacks make it more difficult? Sure, I think they do,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), a close ally of Boehner’s and McConnell’s. “And I think whatever negotiations they go into, and I include the president in this, the key is, ‘Trust but verify.’”

Reid has become the chief proponent of the hardball Democratic strategy, insisting the party will not bend to the demands of the Republicans before the government reopens or the debt ceiling is raised. Reid doesn’t seem to want anyone in the White House to back away from the party’s ironclad stance — a government-funding bill and a debt-ceiling increase with no strings attached.

Reid, though, is unfazed by the growing GOP criticism that he’s responsible for the impasse — and he even took a poke at Boehner on Thursday.

“Some recent stories have even suggested the speaker’s keeping government shut because I hurt his feelings,” Reid told reporters Thursday. “If that’s true, I’m sorry that I hurt your feelings.”

Had Boehner stuck to his word, Reid said, the country wouldn’t be in the mess it finds itself in.

“We met the first week we came back in September, and [Boehner] told me what he wanted was a clean CR and a $988 [billion] number,” Reid added. “The exact bill that he now refuses to let the House vote on, that was our negotiation. I didn’t twist his arm, he twisted mine a little bit to get that number.”

Reid added: “I said, ‘John, I can’t do that.’ He said, ‘You’ve got to do that.’ … He couldn’t live up to that, so he has been doing gymnastics with himself ever since then.”

Boehner’s office declined to swing back on this one. “We don’t discuss private conversations the speaker has with Sen. Reid in the press,” Steel said.

The bickering continued in what all sides called an unproductive meeting at the White House on Wednesday.

At the meeting, Reid slammed Boehner for suggesting that a “grand bargain” could be reached between Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), sources said. In the meeting, McConnell repeated a speech he’s made dozens of times, saying that divided government is a time to make big deals. Obama reportedly scoffed at his pitch.

Don Stewart, a McConnell spokesman, declined to characterize the Kentucky Republican’s remarks at the White House meeting. And he added that there are “no negotiations under way” with Biden since the White House has made clear it will not cut a deal.

While Obama, Reid and Pelosi appear as united as never before, it hasn’t always been that way. Hill Democrats, including Reid, have questioned Obama’s skills as a negotiator based on big fiscal deals cut between 2010-2012. For instance, Reid was prepared to go over the “fiscal cliff” last December, which would have allowed tax rates to jump even while the sequester slashed federal spending. Reid thought doing so would have provided Democrats more room to negotiate on those issues.

Obama, Biden and White House officials, though, believed it would have been potentially disastrous for a tenuous rebound by the U.S. economy.

In the end, Biden cut a deal with McConnell that raised taxes on Americans making more than $400,000 annually while delaying automatic sequestration cuts for two months. Reid believed the White House gave away far too much.

But the country faces yet another fiscal crisis today.