Despite Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s break from the bipartisan “Gang of Six” budget negotiations, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vowed Wednesday to push on with the effort to fashion a compromise plan to tackle the nation’s long-term deficit. Warner and Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., are leading the group, which has been huddling over the past five months to find a way to trim the country’s ever-ballooning deficit by more than $4 trillion over the next 10 years.
“We’ve made way too much progress to not keep moving forward,” Warner said Wednesday. “I still expect that we’re going to have a product.”
But negotiations hit an impasse this week when Coburn, a Republican, proposed cutting an additional $130 billion from Medicare — beyond the $400 billion in cuts recommended by President Obama’s deficit commission, according to an aide familiar with the negotiations.
“It’s not good,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization. “I think the Gang of Six was the best hope. So right now that hope is on hold.”
The group’s plan is proposing $3 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases, a ratio in line with the deficit commission’s recommendations.
Cutting entitlement programs like Medicare and ending popular tax breaks like the mortgage interest deduction have been discussed.
Coburn and other members of the group supported the deficit commission’s recommendations, including a broad overhaul of the tax code and cuts to Social Security, though the proposal failed to garner enough votes on the commission to pass.
Despite the setback this week, Warner said everyone has been working in good faith and hoping Coburn would eventually rejoin the talks.
“This is too big of an issue to quit on,” he said.
President Obama and congressional Republicans laid out dueling plans for tackling the nation’s long-term deficit and cutting it by $4 trillion to $6 trillion over the next 10 to 12 years. But Democrats rejected a GOP proposal, drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that would remake Medicare as a voucher program. And Republicans oppose calls by Obama and Democrats to raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000 a year.
Lawmakers were looking to the Gang of Six to find middle ground.
“I think it was a serous effort to produce a plan,” Bixby said. “Right now it’s hard to think of anything that could pass both houses. However we deal with it, it is ultimately going to have to be a bipartisan solution, simply because neither side has the votes to rush through their own plan.”
Despite Coburn’s exit, the remaining members of the group went ahead with a meeting Wednesday and said they’ll continue to work toward a compromise.
Vice President Biden is spearheading talks with a separate bipartisan group of lawmakers — House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., among them — over federal spending and the need to raise the federal debt limit, which Republicans threatened to oppose unless the increased borrowing is offset by spending cuts.
“They’re going to have to do something to get over the debt limit, and I trust that the Biden group will find a way to do that,” Bixby said.
