Senate Majority Leader Braces for a Storm of Conservative Protests Over Debt Ceiling, Budget

Mean­while, Mc­Con­nell is work­ing to broker a budget deal with the White House, along­side Boehner and Demo­crat­ic lead­ers, that will keep the gov­ern­ment fun­ded past Dec. 11 when the next gov­ern­ment-shut­down clock ex­pires.

That deal will al­most cer­tainly ne­ces­sit­ate that Mc­Con­nell and Boehner—who him­self will likely be out of of­fice by the time the deal is an­nounced—agree to in­crease spend­ing for nondefense pro­grams, a non­starter for Far-Right mem­bers in both cham­bers. Giv­en that such a deal is ex­pec­ted to come after Nov. 3, Mc­Con­nell is likely to be left as the only Re­pub­lic­an “in the room” on the deal to sell it to Re­pub­lic­ans in both cham­bers. With the next speak­er still un­known, the pos­sib­il­ity (par­tic­u­larly if Rep. Paul Ry­an takes a pass) that he or she will be more con­ser­vat­ive than Boehner would make the pitch for a fi­nal deal in the House even more dif­fi­cult.

Few de­tails about the as-now hy­po­thet­ic­al budget deal have yet emerged, in part, sources close to the talks say, be­cause there aren’t yet many firm de­tails to leak. But what has leaked so far is telling.

Mc­Con­nell, who fore­cas­ted to his mem­bers dur­ing the sum­mer that they would have to make some con­ces­sions on spend­ing in an even­tu­al budget deal, first leaked that talks were be­gin­ning earli­er this month.

Demo­crats, who had been call­ing for Re­pub­lic­ans to agree to budget talks for months, were furi­ous that Mc­Con­nell made pub­lic what they thought were early, private talks. In re­sponse, they leaked—in­clud­ing to this pub­lic­a­tion—that Mc­Con­nell had asked Boehner and Obama to leave House Minor­ity Lead­er Nancy Pelosi and Sen­ate Minor­ity Lead­er Harry Re­id out of the talks.

Des­pite the early spat, the talks have con­tin­ued and the only sub­stant­ive leak out of the dis­cus­sions so far came just a week ago, when CNN re­por­ted that Mc­Con­nell has asked for en­ti­tle­ment changes in ex­change for a lar­ger budget deal that will in­crease fed­er­al spend­ing over the se­quest­ra­tion caps set to take ef­fect next year. Un­sur­pris­ingly, Demo­crats im­me­di­ately—and very pub­licly—said that re­quest was a no-go.

But the de­mand has the same ef­fect for Mc­Con­nell as put­ting the sanc­tu­ary-cit­ies bill on the floor this week: It gives him cred­ib­il­ity with an in­creas­ingly frac­tious group of con­ser­vat­ive mem­bers in both cham­bers and puts Demo­crats, not lead­er­ship, on the hook for any fail­ure to reach the Far Right’s goals. It also provides a key talk­ing point for mem­bers seek­ing reelec­tion next year, par­tic­u­larly those who may have a primary op­pon­ent sniff­ing around their states and dis­tricts.

Will that be suf­fi­cient to keep Re­pub­lic­ans happy un­der Mc­Con­nell’s watch? That’s un­clear.

But keep­ing mem­bers suf­fi­ciently happy with his lead­er­ship style and con­ser­vat­ive cre­den­tials isn’t Mc­Con­nell’s primary mo­tiv­a­tion. As Na­tion­al Journ­al has re­por­ted, while threats to oust him have grown louder since Boehner an­nounced his resig­na­tion, Mc­Con­nell’s job re­mains re­l­at­ively safe.

What is at stake for the lead­er is less about repu­ta­tion than it is about the in­sti­tu­tion. Dur­ing the 2014 cam­paign, Mc­Con­nell ran for reelec­tion and cam­paigned for a Sen­ate ma­jor­ity on the prom­ise of re­turn­ing to reg­u­lar or­der and end­ing the gov­ern­ing-by-crisis style that had dom­in­ated in the past few years. As an in­sti­tu­tion­al­ist, in­creas­ing the debt ceil­ing and hash­ing out a ma­jor budget deal to al­low Con­gress to pass reg­u­lar spend­ing bills next year (if not the fol­low­ing year as well), is para­mount.

And that will re­quire agree­ment from a large swath of con­gres­sion­al Re­pub­lic­ans. Any­thing Mc­Con­nell can do now to get the party on the same page and boost in­tern­al mor­ale could go a long way in the fights to come.

“What we’re try­ing to do here in the Sen­ate is make as much pro­gress for the coun­try as we can,” Mc­Con­nell told re­port­ers Tues­day. “I think it is also note­worthy that our agenda is en­tirely dif­fer­ent from the agenda that we had last year. We have a dif­fer­ent set of pri­or­it­ies [than Demo­crats], and are pur­su­ing dif­fer­ent out­comes, but we are choos­ing to ad­vance the cause on the is­sues where there is at least enough bi­par­tis­an sup­port to get it out of the Sen­ate and hope­fully, to get a pres­id­en­tial sig­na­ture.”