Desperate to get out of the political box they helped to create, Senate Republicans are actively pursuing a new plan under which the debt ceiling would grow in three increments over the remainder of this Congress unless lawmakers approve a veto-proof resolution of disapproval. 
 
 In effect lawmakers would be surrendering the very power of approval that the GOP has used to force the debt crisis now. But by taking the disapproval route, Republicans can shift the onus more onto the White House and Democrats since a two-thirds majority would be needed to stop any increase that President Barack Obama requests. 
 
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 “It gives the president 100 percent of the responsibility for increasing the debt limit if he chooses not to have any spending reductions,” Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Republican Conference chairman, told reporters Tuesday. 
 
 How the plan will sit with House Republicans is unclear. But it offers an escape valve for those in the Senate GOP who fear that if the current crisis persists they will be forced to accept some tax revenue increases as part of any settlement. 
 
 Indeed with the August 2 deadline approaching, the new option testified to the darkening outlook in Washington and a growing concern among Senate leaders in both parties that the debt debate has spun out of control. 
 
 Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) acknowledged at a news conference Tuesday that the new plan would not ensure Republicans would get the trillions in spending cuts they’ve been seeking, and he noted that his party has become “increasingly pessimistic” that it can reach a debt deal with Obama. 
 
 This is a “last-choice option,” McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters before heading to the White House for another round of talks. “If we are unable to come together, we think it is extremely important the country reassure the markets that default is not an option and reassure Social Security recipients and military veterans that default is not an option.” 
 
 McConnell, who has watched the in-fighting among House GOP leaders, is helping to shepherd the proposal, which was discussed at the Senate Republicans’ weekly caucus meeting and during White House talks on Tuesday. 
 
 “I think everybody believes there needs to be a backup plan if we are unable to come to an agreement,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said during an appearance on Fox News. “And frankly, I believe Mitch has done good work.” 
 
 But conservatives panned the McConnell plan. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a GOP presidential candidate, described it in a tweet as “an irresponsible surrender to big government, big deficits and continued overspending. I oppose it.” 
 
 And when asked if he would back the proposal, freshman Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told POLITICO: “Absolutely not. Never.” 
 
 “We have no business raising the debt limit without fundamentally changing the way we spend money in this town,” he said. 
 
 McConnell will need Democratic help to enact the required authorizing legislation. He has already consulted with Majority Leader Harry Reid on the idea and Reid is pursuing his own option of creating a joint deficit reduction committee able to force an up-or-down vote without amendments, akin to past base closing commissions. ||||| The debt deal Mitch McConnell is offering is confusing a lot of people, so here’s the core of it: Until now, Republicans have wanted a policy payoff for permitting President Obama and the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. McConnell is proposing to replace that with a political payoff. That’s it. That’s the deal. The question is why House Republicans would go for it. 
 
 The process McConnell is proposing would go like this: First, Obama would submit a request for a $700 billion increase in the debt ceiling, along with a nonbinding proposal to cut spending. That would automatically trigger a $100 billion increase in the debt ceiling to give Congress time to consider the request. Congress could then vote to either approve or disapprove of the president’s request. If they disapprove of it, however, Obama could veto their disapproval, and unless two-thirds of both chambers voted to overturn his veto — a virtually unthinkable outcome given that Democrats control the Senate — he could raise the debt ceiling anyway. 
 
 The same thing would happen, albeit in $900 billion increments rather than $700 billion increments, in fall 2011 and summer 2012. Take it all together, and Republicans would almost completely forfeit their leverage over the debt ceiling. In return, they’d get to make Democrats vote repeatedly to first raise the debt ceiling and then to “approve” of raising the debt ceiling. As Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said, this “gives the president 100 percent of the responsibility.” 
 
 Or, to put it differently, 100 percent of the blame. Raising the debt ceiling is unpopular. That’s part of why House Republicans are demanding such massive concessions in return for doing it. But McConnell, who leads the Senate minority and wants to lead the Senate majority in 2013, would not have to vote for any increases in the debt ceiling, nor would his members. That’s why this appeals to him: It would force Senate Democrats to repeatedly vote to raise the debt ceiling, and he hopes that would make it easier to defeat them in the next election. As David Corn described it, the message to the president is: “You drive. We’ll carp.” 
 
 But perhaps I give McConnell too little credit, and the Kentucky Republican is simply terrified that Republicans and Democrats really won’t come to an agreement on the debt ceiling and he’s desperately searching for a way past the gridlock. If so, it’s a bit late. 
 
 House Republicans, who already hold the majority, can’t possibly accept this deal. It would mean they have to take a vote to hand power on the debt ceiling over to the White House. “We, the House, hate this and it will not move,” a House GOP aide told the National Review. “It would basically mean that the president only needs one third of either body to raise the debt limit, meaning that we would cede our majority status in the House. Can you imagine how insane this would make the grass roots/tea party — we have the numbers to stop an increase, but we completely give up and let Dems uphold a veto with a one-third vote. No way.” Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steele, meanwhile, said, “the Speaker shares the Leader’s frustration,” but stopped well short of saying he shares his solution. 
 
 Nor is it likely to be popular among conservative Republicans in the Senate. One anonymous aide told the Huffington Post’s Jon Ward that the “McConnell plan is a full-surrender, white-flag approach.” 
 
 My guess is McConnell is about to suffer a serious backlash from his base. As much as the Senate minority leader’s political incentives might differ from those of the speaker of the House, his ideological incentives are supposed to be the same. And if you believe, as most Republicans do, that the debt ceiling offers a generational opportunity to extract huge concessions from the Democrats, then walking away from that leverage simply isn’t an option, and any member of the Republican leadership who proposes to do so has to be seen as intensely suspect. ||||| With White House debt talks at a make-or-break stage, Speaker John Boehner signaled Thursday that he’s open to new options to avert a default next month, including a novel Senate plan that would surrender much of Congress’s power over Treasury’s borrowing to the president. 
 
 It would be a remarkable shift for House Republicans — something like telling Pickett’s charge to go around Cemetery Ridge and not up it. And Boehner’s remarks may be a ploy as he keeps throwing out options to his rank and file in hopes that they come around to the merits of the $4 trillion grand bargain he attempted with President Barack Obama last week — before being pulled down by the right. 
 
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 Testifying to this interest going into the weekend , Boehner met Friday morning with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner Friday morning and then stopped by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office for a rare visit. 
 
 But time is running short, and to describe Congress as a confused, even panicky army at this stage is not an overstatement. Senate leaders in both parties already are working on some survival strategy. And Obama, who said Friday he also still wants a “big deal”, will be forced to do the same unless he can salvage a more meaningful deficit reduction strategy over the weekend. 
 
 The genius of the plan put forward by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is that it gives lawmakers what politicians most love: an out. But it’s so obvious in doing so that deficit hawks are dismayed at the crossroads Congress has reached. 
 
 As outlined by McConnell, Congress would temporarily surrender its power to approve any increase in the debt ceiling. Instead, lawmakers would authorize more than $2.5 trillion in new borrowing authority for the Treasury to be implemented in three increments of $700 billion this month, $900 billion in the fall and the final $900 billion next summer. 
 
 The president would be required in each case to list corresponding savings. But under the new rules of the road, Congress could only stop each increase by adopting a veto-proof resolution of disapproval. 
 
 That hands the power to one-third of each chamber, an infuriating prospect for many House Republicans. And in the Senate, McConnell candidly admits that he would have little chance then of prevailing since the GOP begins with just 47 votes. 
 
 “Mitch described his proposal as a last-ditch effort, in case we’re unable to do anything else,” Boehner told reporters Thursday. “What may look like something less than optimal today if we’re unable to reach an agreement, it might look pretty good a couple of weeks from now. … Frankly, I think it is an option that may be worthy at some point.” 
 
 McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are already looking at ways to expand on the bill, including the addition of substantial savings identified in talks with the White House. And McConnell very much wants some agreement upfront on spending caps for annual appropriations bills for fiscal 2012 as well as 2013. 
 
 With their combined muscle, the two leaders stand a good chance of winning Senate passage, but the real test will be what Boehner and his leadership must next add to get the bill through the House. 
 
 “I think we need to continue to solve our short-term and long-term debt issue. That means the big deal,' the Speaker said Thursday evening in a Fox News interview. 'This is the moment of opportunity here.'" 
 
 Obama has left open the possibility of further budget talks this weekend, but Thursday’s session, about 80 minutes, was shorter than many and appears to have ended with him tossing the ball back to the House and Senate leaders to think over what’s the next best step. 
 
 An estimated $1.7 trillion in potential savings have been identified that are acceptable to Obama, said a Democrat familiar with the talks, and Obama’s strong preference is to go with a still larger package. But “there’s a clear sense that it is time to act,” said the same official, and the understanding is the next 24-36 hours will tell what the congressional leaders believe is doable. ||||| Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is in active negotiation with the White House on a debt ceiling deal, and Democrats agreed late Saturday night to postpone a partisan-tinged cloture vote to give time for both sides to find a compromise. 
 
 “There are many elements to be finalized, and there is still a distance to go before any arrangement can be completed,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “But I believe we should give everyone as much room as possible to do their work.” 
 
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 “I’m glad to see this move toward cooperation and compromise. I hope it bears fruit.” 
 
 Just hours before Reid had sparred on the floor with McConnell over the seriousness of his efforts, and Reid’s change of tone — and tactics — suggested that real progress had been made. “We’re getting close,” said one GOP leadership aide, with knowledge of the discussions. 
 
 “In the category of getting serious, I have spoken to both the president and the vice president within the last hour,” McConnell had told reporters earlier in day in a joint appearance with Speaker John Boehner. “We are now fully engaged, the speaker and I, with the one person in America out of 307 million people who can sign a bill into law. I’m confident and optimistic that we’re going to get an agreement in the very near future and resolve this crisis in the best interests of the American people.” 
 
 Boehner echoed McConnell’s statement, saying he believed that “we are going to be able to come to some sort of agreement.” But the speaker appears to have had no contact himself with President Barack Obama Saturday, while McConnell spoke to the president and reached out to Biden, after which the two men engaged in at least four back-and-forth phone calls through the day. 
 
 The biggest two outstanding issues are the Republicans’ insistence on “dollar-for-dollar” deficit reductions –without new tax revenues—to match any increase in the Treasury’s borrowing authority. And second, what enforcement mechanism is best to ensure that a new joint House-Senate committee will be able to come up with an estimated $1.6 trillion in savings by the end of this year. 
 
 Boehner has said that if the panel fails to meet its target, Obama can’t raise the debt ceiling— a concession that the president refuses to make since it only means more instability six months from now. The White House wants to substitute some alternative trigger that would still be action-forcing but not a threat to the whole economy. Biden is exploring options with McConnell, but even if a compromise is found, the cuts demanded by Boehner now are far larger than what the speaker had been willing to accept from Obama just last week. 
 
 One trigger option that has gained favor would impose across-the-board cuts on spending with the idea of inflicting enough pain that both parties would have an interest in meeting the joint committee's deficit target. Since Republicans have opposed any such sequester impacting revenues, the compromise now is likely to include deep defense cuts, a second priority for the GOP and therefore something of a lever. 
 
 Democrats are fearful that their own priorities—more revenues and fewer Medicare savings—will get lost in the process. And Reid didn’t hide his skepticism after returning from a 90 minute meeting with Obama, Biden and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi at the White House. 
 
 “Boehner won’t even negotiate and McConnell is going backward,” said one aide close to the situation. And Reid bluntly accused McConnell of engaging more for show that real compromise. 
 
 “The Republican leader says he’s engaged,” Reid said ruefully. “Fortunately, members of his caucus, at least as far as I’m concerned, are more engaged than he is. There are meaningful talks going on with some of his members with my senators.” 
 
 McConnell shot back, “I actually cut short a conversation with the vice president” to come to the floor. 
 
 The Democrats bigger worry is Boehner, who shows signs of simply running-out-the-clock, playing hard-to-get with Obama and hoping the White House will give into his demands.
– Another day, another round of meetings and threats, and still no deal on the debt ceiling. But the big news looks to be a surprise "backup plan" from Mitch McConnell that would give President Obama unprecedented power to raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion in three installments through the end of his term, reports Politico. Congress could theoretically reject the separate requests, but Obama's veto power makes it a virtual certainty that all would go through. (The Hill has more details.) McConnell said he reluctantly offered the plan to give the markets confidence that the US would avoid a default if no other deal is reached. Republicans would be giving up leverage but getting a "political payoff" in return, writes Ezra Klein at the Washington Post. Obama and Democrats would get "100% of the blame" for raising the ceiling, and no Republican would have to vote in favor. It's not clear yet whether the White House or even the GOP rank-and-file will go along, however. The National Review quotes a Republican aide in the House who thinks it will never fly because it means giving up too much power.