Inside The Meeting Where Obama And Reid Vowed Not To Be 'Taken In By These Crazy People'
Sam Stein & Ryan Grim
HuffPost, Updated: 10/22/2013 11:54 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama and Harry Reid needed to clear the air. The relationship between the president and the Senate majority leader had been deteriorating since 2011, with Reid losing respect for Obama's ability to negotiate with Republicans and Obama unsure if Reid had as much control over his Senate Democratic caucus as he liked to say.
So at the White House's invitation, the two met in the Oval Office on July 9, with no staff, to talk one on one. It was a cathartic moment, one in which long-buried tensions were fully aired. Aides to the two men tell a similar story: Their boss had been losing confidence in his counterpart and wanted the meeting as a way to buck up the other.
Reid (D-Nev.) pressed the president hard on the 2011 debt ceiling compromise that the White House had cut with the GOP, which ultimately gave the country sequestration. He complained that Vice President Joe Biden had undercut fiscal cliff negotiations at the end of 2012, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was offered a more generous deal on tax revenue and sequester spending than Reid felt he could have crafted.
It didn't escape his notice, Reid said, that the deal Biden made conveniently postponed the budget cuts two months, or just long enough to allow the Inauguration and the State of the Union address to pass without the sequester's shadow. Senate Democrats had been pushing for a two-year delay and had been prepared to settle for just one.
Now, in July of this year, the country was feeling sequestration's effects. Head Start classes were shuttered, scientific research imperiled, cancer treatments hampered, and the broad concept of functioning government was under assault.
(More here.)
HuffPost, Updated: 10/22/2013 11:54 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama and Harry Reid needed to clear the air. The relationship between the president and the Senate majority leader had been deteriorating since 2011, with Reid losing respect for Obama's ability to negotiate with Republicans and Obama unsure if Reid had as much control over his Senate Democratic caucus as he liked to say.
So at the White House's invitation, the two met in the Oval Office on July 9, with no staff, to talk one on one. It was a cathartic moment, one in which long-buried tensions were fully aired. Aides to the two men tell a similar story: Their boss had been losing confidence in his counterpart and wanted the meeting as a way to buck up the other.
Reid (D-Nev.) pressed the president hard on the 2011 debt ceiling compromise that the White House had cut with the GOP, which ultimately gave the country sequestration. He complained that Vice President Joe Biden had undercut fiscal cliff negotiations at the end of 2012, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was offered a more generous deal on tax revenue and sequester spending than Reid felt he could have crafted.
It didn't escape his notice, Reid said, that the deal Biden made conveniently postponed the budget cuts two months, or just long enough to allow the Inauguration and the State of the Union address to pass without the sequester's shadow. Senate Democrats had been pushing for a two-year delay and had been prepared to settle for just one.
Now, in July of this year, the country was feeling sequestration's effects. Head Start classes were shuttered, scientific research imperiled, cancer treatments hampered, and the broad concept of functioning government was under assault.
(More here.)
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