House Republicans appear to be rallying behind $85 billion budget deal House Republicans appeared Wednesday to be rallying around an $85 billion deal to avert ­another government shutdown, brushing off complaints from their right wing that the effort would trade immediate spending cuts for less-certain long-term savings. After conducting a series of closed-door briefings and polling members during a late-afternoon vote, GOP leadership aides confidently predicted that the deal struck between House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) would sail through the House when it comes to a vote Thursday. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said at a news conference Wednesday that the budget deal he hammered out with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) takes a step in the right direction. More business news Lori Montgomery Leadership aides confidently predict that $85 billion budget plan would sail through the House in vote Thursday. Ylan Q. Mui and Scott Wilson Stan Fischer, who helped Israel navigate the global financial crisis, would be the No. 2 official at the Fed. Cecilia Kang After backlash, commissioners are dragging their feet on Tom Wheeler's proposal to allow calls while in flight. The moment seemed to mark a potentially significant shift by House Republicans away from the uncompromising confrontation of recent years and toward a determined era of more functional governance. After multiple standoffs and threatened defaults and one actual shutdown, polls show that the Republican brand has been badly damaged among voters, and even some of the most conservative Republicans said they were ready for a breather. "That's the only reason" to vote for the budget deal - "to calm things down," said Rep. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.), who said she was undecided about the measure. To reset the debate is a great way to describe it. The only sign of trouble came from arch-conservatives who routinely buck House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). But they acknowledged that their government-shrinking priorities had been abandoned in favor of Republican concerns about the Pentagon budget and political fallout from another shutdown. "This bill is not designed to get our vote," said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), an outspoken renegade first elected in the GOP landslide of 2010. It's designed to pass with a bipartisan vote of the House. Independent conservative groups with a proven ability to sway Republicans continued to batter the agreement, which would cancel half of the sharp agency cuts known as the sequester in the current fiscal year and replace them with a mix of fees and other savings. On Wednesday, Chris Chocola, president of the conservative Club for Growth, complained that the plan "swaps debt reduction today and next year for the dubious promise of debt reduction a decade from now." But Boehner fired back during a brief news conference Wednesday, suggesting that the Club for Growth, Heritage Action for America and other groups were vilifying a reasonable proposal to fuel their own fundraising campaigns. "They're using our members and they're using the American people for their own goals," Boehner said. Glen Bolger, a leading Republican pollster, said the budget deal puts House Republicans at a crossroads: They can pass a compromise that represents progress toward the goal of reducing the size of government, or they can reject the deal as insufficiently conservative and cement the party's reputation for obstruction. "We are either a party that is serious about governing when control of Washington is split, or we are an unserious party that doesn't care about realistic incremental gains, only about unrealistically getting the whole ball of wax, which will never happen as long as there is a Democratic president and a Democratic [Senate] majority leader," Bolger said. We have to stop being the dysfunctional equivalent of the Washington Redskins.