Senate Dems wave off defections, say pressure on House GOP

Senate Democratic leaders on Wednesday downplayed the defection of 11 members of the caucus who opposed the package of spending cuts they put on the floor the day before.
 
Democratic leaders said the onus is not on them but on House Republicans to compromise on the $61 billion in spending cuts passed by the House last month. Democrats say they have always been willing to meet in the middle.
 
{mosads}In floor comments earlier in the day, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made it clear that both sides would need to compromise, saying: “We accept the lessons of yesterday’s vote.”
  
Schumer said the defections didn’t mean much.
 
“There are some Democrats who want to go further than the $51 billion but that wasn’t the point. We didn’t twist arms or whip them,” Schumer said during a mid-day press conference. 
 
Reid left the press conference early and declined to answer reporters’ questions.
 
“The lesson that Sen. Reid was referring to, the lesson that we’re all referring to, is that H.R. 1 can’t pass, and if you insist on H.R. 1 we’re going to be gridlocked, so give us some alternatives,” he added, in reference to the package of House-passed spending cuts.
 
Schumer accused Republicans of intransigence and said Boehner must come forward with a new proposal for fiscal 2011 spending levels to avert a government shutdown.
 
“We are now asking Speaker Boehner to go talk to his 89 freshmen who seem to say they just want H.R. 1 or nothing, show them that that can’t happened and come back and say ‘what are you willing to put on the table,’ ” he said. 

Schumer later corrected himself to note there are 87 Republican freshmen in the House.
 
Democratic leaders have begun to mull the possibility of including tax increases or entitlement reform in the spending package to keep government operating through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
 
“It would be a lot better for the country not to take all of the cuts from a small portion of the budget so that you have these consequences and look at other things,” Schumer said.
 
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) also called for efforts to reduce the deficit to go beyond non-security discretionary spending cuts.
 
“If you’re serious about this deficit, you have to put more, if not everything, on the table,” Durbin told reporters.
 
Like Schumer, Durbin also downplayed the defection of Democrats on Wednesday. He said it showed that both Democratic and Republican leaders will have to agree to cuts between $6.2 billion and $57 billion, the targets laid out in the two spending bills that failed in the Senate.
 
“It tells you that [for] at least nine of them, the number is somewhere between 51 and 100,” Durbin said, using President Obama’s 2011 budget request as a benchmark for the projected savings in the two bills.