Conrad sees opportunity for ‘five guys’ group due to impasse in Biden talks

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said Thursday that the current impasse at the Biden debt-limit talks may provide an opportunity for his bipartisan negotiating group.

Conrad, the Senate Budget Committee chairman, said that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-Va.) exit from the Biden talks may mean that the Gang of Six – currently the “Five Guys,” since the departure of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) – may be able to “play a constructive role.”

{mosads}Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), another gang member, said Wednesday that the he wants the group to “come out of the closet” and reveal what they have been talking about.

Another member, Republican Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), appeared on Thursday to shoot down the idea of speeding up the talks.

“I always say that we should get a plan first,” he told reporters. “Once we get a deal — and we are still in the process of working through the dynamics of that — then we can determine a rollout. I think we should rollout as soon as we get something.”

He said he did not necessarily feel that the group was under more pressure to release something now.

“The pressure is not from these kind of politics, it is from the crisis that our nation faces,” he said. “I don’t know that it has increased.”

Conrad said that the remaining members of the gang were scheduled to gather on the Senate floor Thursday, but that meeting had to be put off for scheduling reasons.

Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) are also in the group. They have been working for seven months on a deal that would achieve $4.7 trillion or so in deficit reduction over nine years, through a combination of spending cuts, entitlement reform and revenue increases through simplification of the tax code.