With only hours to go until the Oct. 17 deadline to raise the debt limit the Senate is scrambling to come up with a deal after House Republicans scrapped their plan to draft a bill that would reopen the government and keep it from default, according to the Chicago Tribune.
A bipartisan bill had been in the process of being crafted in the Senate when news came from House Republicans that they would be drafting their own bill that would include cuts to the Affordable Care Act.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are thought to be very close to a deal that they will be able to introduce on Wednesday. Once the Senate has drafted a bill it will be sent to the House to be voted on first, thus expediting the process. If it passes in the House only one roll call vote will be needed to move to a final vote in the Senate, according to Politico.
It remains to be seen if any bill that extends the debt ceiling without defunding the Affordable Care Act will be able to receive enough votes within the House to pass, or for that matter, for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to even bring it up for a vote.
Boehner was trying to convince the most conservative tea party affiliated members of the House to accept a bill that would only have minor changes to the health care law but he was rebuffed. Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., said that Boehner was "herding cats," according to the New York Times.
"This is about as challenging as it can be, in terms of trying to figure out where the effective agreement is going to be to move forward and how do you get to that point where everybody looks at that and says, 'Well, that isn't everything but that's a reasonable way forward,'" David Winston, an adviser to Boehner, told the New York Times.
If a bill comes out of the Senate it will be doing so with very little time for the House to consider it before the deadline. The government will not default if the deadline is met, the deadline means that the government can no longer borrow any money, but if a deal to raise the debt ceiling isn't made within a couple of days default becomes a very real threat.
