In debt deal, the triumph of the old Washington

It was the new Washington that started this fight: the tea party congressmen who thought that fresh eyes and pure hearts qualified them as revolutionaries. The president who believed that the way out of the problem was to think bigger.

By Saturday, they had all choked on their ambitions.

 

Then, over three fast-moving days, the old Washington swooped in to save them.

The deal that solved the crisis was cut, over the phone, by two men with a combined 64 years in federal office. The votes that passed that deal were cast by veterans and moderates — the survivors of “wave” elections intended to clean the place out.

The solution they produced was as time-tested as they are. And as flawed.

“It may have been messy. It might have appeared to some like their government wasn’t working,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), one of the two who crafted the compromise. “But, in fact, the opposite was true.”

The story of how the debt-ceiling deal came together was gathered from interviews with the principal negotiators and their staff members. They described how a very public fight — carried out over weeks of news conferences, speeches and televised potshots — came to be solved in one of Washington’s most private places.

On Saturday afternoon at 1:30, McConnell picked up a phone in an ornate office in the heart of the Capitol, separated from the public by four doors, three receptionists and a police guard.

He called Vice President Biden. Each man knew the other wanted a deal.

“We didn’t have to say that to one another,” McConnell said. He had arrived in the Senate in 1985. By then, Biden had already been there 12 years. “I didn’t have to waste a lot of time telling Joe what my bottom line was.”

At that point, there were less than four days remaining before the deadline. Both parties had already tried to seize control of the crisis — and failed.

President Obama had demanded a deal that would launch a two-sided attack on the national debt: Tax revenue would go up, and spending on Medicare and Social Security would go down. He didn’t get it.

Then House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) had tried to organize Republicans behind a proposal that would attack the debt with spending cuts only. He couldn’t. A handful of right-wingers also wanted a guarantee of a balanced-budget amendment, and they successfully defied him.

“You saw very easily how a compromise could come together” at that point, a Democratic aide said. But it hadn’t so far. After Biden and McConnell began talking, however, the details quickly took shape.

They would allow Obama to raise the debt ceiling by more than $2 trillion. They would impose about $917 billion in spending cuts. And they would create a special congressional committee to find at least $1.2 trillion more in savings — possibly by examining the tax code and expensive benefit programs such as Medicare.

They also worked out something called “the trigger.” It was the legal equivalent of a grenade that both sides held. If the two parties pulled apart — if the special committee deadlocked, or if Congress rejected its ideas — it would be triggered. And then, the idea was, they would both be very, very sorry.