With the default deadline just two days away, prospects for a debt-limit deal seemed to significantly brighten early Sunday after the White House entered intense negotiations with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Saturday in a last-ditch bid to forge a bipartisan agreement to raise the federal debt limit. 
 
 Late Sunday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) had given his approval to the emerging debt deal, but must still present the plan to his caucus possibly later Sunday evening. “Senator Reid has signed off on the debt-ceiling agreement pending caucus approval,” his office said. 
 
 After emerging from a lengthy closed-door meeting with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic leaders late Sunday afternoon, Reid (D-Nev.) was asked whether he expects a vote on the deal tonight. 
 
 “I hope so,” he told reporters. 
 
 But sources in both parties said all sides were close to signing off on the emerging agreement except House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). While the reason for the hangup was not immediately clear, the framework has the potential to trigger big cuts in the defense budget. Defense cuts are likely to be problematic for many of the veteran Republicans Boehner will need to push a compromise through the House. A Boehner spokesman did not immediately respond to questions. 
 
 Meanwhile, as expected, the Senate failed to break the 60-vote threshold to end debate on a bill by Reid’s (D-Nev.) bill to raise the debt ceiling by $2.2 trillion in an early afternoon vote on Sunday as the outlines of the deal between Senate leaders and the White House began to take shape. Fifty senators voted to end debate on Reid’s bill and 49 opposed stopping it. 
 
 The winds began shifting towards a deal shortly after 10 p.m. Saturday night when Reid announced that talks between McConnell (R-Ky.) and Vice President Biden had made significant progress, prompting Reid to delay a vote that had been scheduled for 1 a.m. Sunday on his own debt-limit measure. 
 
 “Relief” is the way Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) described the mood on Capitol Hill on CNN’s State of the Nation Sunday morning. “Default is far less of a possibility now then it was even a day ago, because the leaders are talking and talking in a constructive way.” 
 
 But, Schumer added, “There are lots of things that are not filled in.” 
 
 On the same show, McConnell echoed that “we had a good day yesterday” and the parties “were very close” to crafting a deal framework that he could “soon” recommend that Senate Republicans support. 
 
 “We’re not going to have default,” McConnell stated. 
 
 “There are negotiations going on at the White House to avert a catastrophic default on the nation’s debt,” Reid said, after announcing that the vote had been pushed back to 1 p.m. Sunday. “There are many elements to be finalized, and there is still a distance to go before any arrangement can be completed. But I believe we should give everyone as much room as possible to do their work.” 
 
 He added: “I’m glad to see this move toward cooperation and compromise. I hope it bears fruit.” 
 
 The emerging agreement calls for raising the $14.3 trillion debt limit by up to $2.4 trillion in two stages, with the debt limit rising unless two-thirds of both chambers of Congress disapprove, according to officials in both parties familiar with the talks. That would extend the Treasury’s borrowing authority into 2013, satisfying President Obama’s demand to avoid another showdown over the issue in the heat of the 2012 presidential campaign. 
 
 The first stage would pair an increase of roughly $1 trillion with cuts to government agencies of about the same magnitude over the next decade. In the second stage, a special congressional committee would be created to identify additional savings later this year. The size of those savings would dictate the size of the second debt-limit increase, giving Republicans the dollar-for-dollar matchup they have demanded between spending cuts and the debt-limit increase. 
 
 The focus of talks Saturday was a mechanism to force the committee to act and to ensure that Congress adopts its recommendations. Late Saturday, McConnell and Biden appeared to have settled on a trigger that would cut most government spending – including the defense budget and Medicare — by as much as 4 percent if the committee failed to produce a plan to tame the spiraling national debt, the officials said. 
 
 It was not immediately clear whether Boehner would accept the emerging framework, or whether he could persuade his fractious conference to support it. But Boehner, too, showed signs of paving the way for compromise Saturday, convening a meeting of the Tuesday Group, a bloc of about 45 moderate Republicans whose votes would be key to pushing any deal through the House. 
 
 “I’d like a big, bold, bipartisan plan. I think that’s what the country needs,” Rep. Robert J. Dold (R-Ill.) said after the meeting. “It’s certainly something I’m looking for.” 
 
 Reid’s announcement of progress in the talks shattered an air of desperation that had settled over the Capitol earlier in the day as rank-and-file lawmakers pleaded with their leaders to set politics aside and strike a bipartisan deal. After months of negotiation and weeks of debate, every black-and-white plan for cutting government spending and raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling was doomed or had already been shot down. 
 
 As the battle entered its final hours, the nation’s leaders were left bickering among themselves, unable to agree even on a modest version of the deal they said they were close to sealing a week ago. Their remaining differences were not especially large, but a resolution appeared elusive. 
 
 “It really shouldn’t be this difficult,” Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said in a speech on the Senate floor. “I believe there’s a bipartisan consensus here in the Senate . . . if we stop talking past each other.” 
 
 Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, Reid and McConnell conducted separate talks with the White House in search of an agreement. But the two men were barely speaking to each other, and their anger boiled over onto the Senate floor. 
 
 Reid accused McConnell of blocking the path to compromise that many Senate Republicans were eager to pursue. 
 
 “While the Republican leader is holding meaningless press conferences, his members are reaching out to me . . . to try to move the process forward,” Reid said testily, referring to a midafternoon news conference when McConnell and announced that they were in direct talks with Obama. 
 
 McConnell fired back that he was “more optimistic than my friend, the majority leader,” after negotiating privately with Biden. “I think we’ve got a chance of getting there,” McConnell said. 
 
 “We’re going to get a result on a bipartisan basis. That’s what I’m working on,” McConnell added, complaining that he had been forced to “cut short a conversation with the vice president” to answer Reid’s summons to a meaningless procedural vote. “I’d actually like to get back to work.” 
 
 A Democratic official familiar with the talks said Biden and McConnell were focused on combining the debt-limit plans that emerged from bipartisan negotiations among congressional leaders last weekend. That effort was cut short by Democrats, including Obama. The next day, Reid and Boehner unveiled very similar bills that would cut deeply into agency budgets and create a 12-member committee to find more savings by the end of the year. 
 
 The key difference was the length of the debt-limit extension. Boehner’s bill, which passed the House but died in the Senate, would have granted a reprieve only through February or March 2013, after the 2012 election is decided. Unless the committee came up with $1.8 trillion in additional savings, Congress would face another standoff over the debt limit. 
 
 Reid’s bill, which was pending in the Senate on Saturday, would increase the debt limit into 2013 and count $1 trillion in savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a move Republicans decried as an accounting gimmick. 
 
 To bridge the divide, McConnell and administration officials had been trying all week to design a mechanism to force the committee to act, giving Republicans their cuts and Obama his debt-limit increase. 
 
 Republicans were opposed to a trigger that would force automatic tax increases; Democrats were opposed to a trigger with spending cuts only. 
 
 On Saturday, Democrats appeared to have conceded the point in exchange for big automatic defense cuts, which they said would give Republicans a powerful incentive to work with Democrats toward a more palatable compromise. 
 
 Unless Congress lifts the debt limit by Tuesday, Treasury officials have said they will begin to run out of cash to pay the nation’s bills. That could force the government into default, an outcome that could devastate the sputtering U.S. recovery and global financial markets. Over the past week, the Dow Jones industrial average fell nearly 540 points amid rising anxiety about the debate in Washington. 
 
 As talks with the White House got underway Saturday, McConnell appeared briefly with Boehner to assure the nation that a resolution was at hand. 
 
 “Our country is not going to default for the first time in history; that is not going to happen,” McConnell said. “We now have a level of seriousness, with the right people at the table.” 
 
 All day Saturday, however, both parties were on the attack. In the House, Republicans were smarting over the Senate’s quick Friday night defeat of Boehner’s proposal for a short-term debt-limit increase. So the GOP returned the favor with a unanimous vote in opposition to Reid’s proposal to increase the debt limit into 2013. 
 
 It was not a real vote. The Reid measure was still pending before the Senate. So Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Rules Committee, drew up his own version of the Reid bill and sent it to its death on the House floor, where 11 Democrats joined Republicans in rejecting the measure, 246 to 173. 
 
 “There are some good things in Senator Reid’s proposals. But I will say this: I don’t believe that continuing down the road towards increasing debt ceilings without the kinds of checks necessary is the right thing to do,” Dreier said. 
 
 Even by House standards, the debate was rowdy and sharp-edged, as lawmakers in both parties hooted and shouted down their colleagues across the aisle. Republicans booed Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who accused Boehner of going “to the dark side” when he rewrote his debt-limit bill to add required passage of a balanced budget amendment — a change designed to appeal to his far-right wing. 
 
 Pelosi turned toward her GOP colleagues and said it again with emphasis. “Let me repeat,” she said, “he chose to go to the dark side.” 
 
 The atmosphere was just as tense and bitter in the Senate, where McConnell delivered a letter to Reid signed by 43 Republicans declaring their opposition to his version of the debt-limit bill. 
 
 Four Republican senators did not sign the letter: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). But there was little evidence that Reid’s bill could muster the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster — a fact Reid tacitly acknowledged when he rejected McConnell’s offer to stage a vote early Saturday evening. 
 
 “There are some good things in Senator Reid’s proposals. But I will say this: I don’t believe that continuing down the road towards increasing debt ceilings without the kinds of checks necessary is the right thing to do,” Dreier said. 
 
 In his weekly address, Obama repeated his call for a bipartisan compromise. 
 
 “It must have the support of both parties that were sent here to represent the American people — not just one faction of one party,” the president said. “Congress must find common ground on a plan that can get support from both parties in the House. And it’s got to be a plan that I can sign by Tuesday.” 
 
 Read more on PostPolitics 
 
 Continuing coverage of the debt crisis 
 
 Democrats will lose now, can win later 
 
 Senate conservatives won’t delay vote 
 
 Default may hit consumers quickly 
 
 A Mitch McConnell moment 
 
 A tougher tests looms for John Boehner 
 
 Rachel Van Dongen contributed to this report. ||||| House passes GOP debt bill over objections of Obama, Democrats; Senate votes to table 
 
 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) delivered a letter Saturday afternoon to Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), signed by 43 Republicans, declaring that Reid’s debt-limit legislation was unacceptable. Needing 60 votes to clear a filibuster hurdle, Reid’s current draft is assured of failure in a 1 a.m. vote Sunday. 
 
 McConnell demanded that President Obama re-engage in negotiations. “It isn’t going to pass, let’s get talking to the administration,” McConnell said Saturday in a floor speech. 
 
 House GOP leaders had won narrow approval of a plan to raise the federal debt limit Friday after revising the measure to appeal to rebellious conservatives, but it was quickly shot down in the Senate, where Democrats began pushing their own plan to avert a national default. 
 
 Heading into the final weekend before the Treasury expects to begin running short of cash to pay the nation’s bills, Reid introduced a new version of his plan to grant the government additional borrowing authority into 2013, setting up the crucial Sunday morning vote in the Senate. 
 
 Democrats conceded that they still lack the votes to repel a GOP filibuster. Reid beseeched his Republican counterpart, McConnell, to join him in reworking the measure so the Senate could pass it and send it back to the House before slumping financial markets open Monday morning. 
 
 But in a phone call Friday evening, McConnell told Reid he wanted the White House at the table and expressed frustration that President Obama had rejected an emerging compromise between the two Senate leaders last weekend. Aides said McConnell expected to speak with administration officials Friday night and tamped down talk of an impasse. But Senate Democratic leaders reacted with outrage, accusing McConnell of blocking a deal. 
 
 “Unless there is a compromise or they accept my bill, we’re headed for economic disaster,” Reid said. 
 
 The late-night jousting in the Senate followed a vote on House Speaker John A. Boehner’s debt-limit measure, which would extend the Treasury’s borrowing power until early next year and force another economy-rattling fistfight within a few months. 
 
 Drafted largely by aides to Reid and McConnell last weekend, the measure was originally designed to appeal to the more centrist Senate. But Boehner (R-Ohio) could not rally enough support from his tea-party-influenced caucus and had to rewrite it at the 11th hour to add a provision that would compel Congress to adopt a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget. 
 
 The change swayed a handful of holdouts, and the measure passed 218 to 210, with every Democrat and more than 20 Republicans voting no. But the episode was a loss of face for the speaker and his leadership team, demonstrating a lack of clout within their own conference. Even their allies in the Senate were stunned. 
 
 “Yes, people can be critical of what we’ve done, but where are the other ideas?” Boehner said on the House floor. “At this point in time, the House is going to act and we’re going to act together.” 
 
 Ultimately, it was for naught. Within two hours, the Senate tabled the measure, 59 to 41, with six conservative Republicans joining all 53 senators in the Democratic caucus in voting against the bill. 
 
 Throughout the day, senators in both parties held out hope for a bipartisan compromise to resolve the relatively small, but significant, differences between the House and Senate bills. 
 
 “We’ve gone through all this acrimony. It’s been painful for everybody to watch, I know,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) “But I’m very confident that soon we’re going to get to a place where we’ll have a bill that can pass both chambers. And I’m totally confident that the American people have nothing to worry about as it relates to Tuesday.” 
 
 
 
 Before the House vote, President Obama added to the chorus calling for compromise. He argued that the two parties are not “miles apart” and that he was prepared to work “all weekend long until we find a solution.” 
 
 At their core, the House and Senate bills are strikingly similar, having emerged from the same bipartisan talks last weekend. Both call for cutting deeply into agency budgets over the next decade and creating a new 12-member committee of lawmakers tasked with identifying trillions of dollars in additional cuts by the end of this year. 
 
 But Reid’s bill would justify a larger increase in the debt limit by counting more than $1 trillion in savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, savings Republicans dismiss as an accounting gimmick. 
 
 Boehner’s bill would give the Treasury a much shorter reprieve and require the committee to come up with $1.8 trillion in additional savings before the government could be granted additional borrowing power. 
 
 A new version of the legislation Reid unveiled Friday went a small part of the way to bridging the difference by aligning the size of the debt-limit increase and the spending cuts at $2.4 trillion. He kept the war savings, a sticking point for Republicans, but added a two-stage process for Obama to raise the debt limit without explicit congressional approval. 
 
 In brief remarks at the White House, Obama said the two sides are “in rough agreement” about the size of the first round of spending cuts and “the next step” to rein in borrowing. “If we need to put in place some kind of enforcement mechanism to hold us all accountable for making these reforms, I’ll support that, too, if it’s done in a smart and balanced way,” Obama said. 
 
 Future cuts 
 
 Talks have been underway for weeks about how to structure a plan so that both parties are encouraged to engage seriously in negotiations over future debt reduction. Democrats want to require both tax hikes and across-the-board spending cuts — which would be unattractive to many lawmakers — if the committee refuses to come up with recommendations for added savings. But Republicans have rejected any trigger that includes a tax hike. 
 
 On Friday, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said the design of that mechanism “is what all the negotiations are about.” He added, “That’s going to part of the endgame.” 
 
 Without such an agreement, Obama warned that the United States stands to lose its sterling AAA credit rating — “not because we didn’t have the capacity to pay our bills. We do. But because we didn’t have a triple-A political system to match our triple-A credit rating.” 
 
 Obama again urged Americans to contact their representatives, clogging Capitol Hill switchboards for a second time this week. The White House also tweeted a number of Twitter handles for Republican lawmakers so voters could press them to “get past this.” 
 
 The president’s lobbying campaign appeared to have little effect in the House, where attempts by Boehner to move toward the center were forcefully rebuffed. 
 
 GOP divisions 
 
 Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had staked their personal reputations on the ability to deliver an all-Republican majority for the legislation. 
 
 They explained to their rank and file that despite broad Republican support in the House for a balanced-budget amendment, an earlier bill including the proposal could not pass the Senate. And the leaders pleaded with GOP lawmakers to support Boehner’s legislation, arguing that a majority for the bill would give McConnell leverage to push it through the Senate — or at least to force concessions from Reid. 
 
 Aides described the vote on the bill as nothing short of a vote of confidence in the leadership. All three leaders predicted victory. 
 
 But Thursday night, they were still short by as many as a dozen votes. So they pulled the bill and rewrote it to meet the demands of the conservative rebels. The balanced-budget amendment was put back into the bill. 
 
 For 23 hours, neither Boehner nor any other Republican leader issued a formal statement or paused in the Capitol hallways to explain to reporters what had happened. On Friday, a chastened Boehner spoke in favor of the rewrite and defended his earlier effort to cut a far-reaching debt-reduction deal with Obama. 
 
 “I stuck my neck out a mile to try to get an agreement with the president of the United States. I stuck my neck out a mile,” Boehner said. “But a lot of people in this town can never say yes.” 
 
 Democrats openly mocked Boehner’s inability to lead his caucus. 
 
 “He didn’t have a plan. By Tuesday, they announced they couldn’t call a vote. Well, maybe Wednesday. No, on Wednesday, they couldn’t call a vote. And then on Thursday, again, they failed to have the majority to call a vote. And so we waited,” Durbin told reporters. 
 
 Even some Senate Republicans were perplexed by the disarray in the House. 
 
 Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) re-affirmed his criticism of the balanced-budget amendment as “bizarro.” 
 
 And Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who served under Boehner in House leadership until his election to the Senate last year, said the rewritten House bill “may be more of a repeat” of the failed “cut, cap, balance” approach championed by conservatives “instead of a movement to being part of the solution.” 
 
 Boehner was “upbeat” during a luncheon with Senate Republicans, participants said, but senators exiting the meeting readily conceded that the House bill would not survive in the Senate. Blunt said talks were focused on finding a compromise that could pass the Democratic Senate and win support from a majority of Boehner’s Republicans. 
 
 “Not all of his members, but a majority,” Blunt said. 
 
 Boehner is likely to suffer defections if he brings up a Senate-passed compromise, and he would need House Democrats to fill in the gaps — a difficult position for him politically. But GOP senators said they believe Boehner stands ready to do what it takes to avoid a default. 
 
 “I think things are moving better than they appear to be moving,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.). “There’s agreement on cuts. And there’s almost unanimous knowledge that default is not in the cards. That’s the heart of the issue. The rest of it’s details.” ||||| WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) unveiled a new debt ceiling bill Friday night that strongly resembles a plan first suggested by his rival, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). 
 
 The bill would cut the deficit by about $2.4 trillion over 10 years, and hike the debt ceiling by the same amount -- a key one-to-one match demanded by Republicans. It also includes a three-step process first proposed by McConnell that would let the president take responsibility of debt-limit increases. 
 
 But one item it did not contain -- and which a number of fence-sitting Republicans have hinted could ease them into a vote -- was some sort of "trigger." 
 
 A trigger is an enforcement mechanism written into the law in case Congress does not meet the deficit-reduction targets. It would guide a committee of 12 lawmakers (in effect a "super Congress"), helping it bring the budget into line. Republicans think a trigger would give that committee "teeth." 
 
 Choosing to include no trigger at all is a gamble on Reid's part. For the past few days, the main sticking point in discussions was over how lawmakers would give that committee the power to ensure its recommendations are enacted. 
 
 House Republicans added that level of enforcement by including only a short-term debt ceiling hike, saying that a second could be passed if and when the targets were being met (and a Constitutional amendment that balanced the budget was passed). 
 
 Democrats scampered around, looking for an alternative. In the end, they chose nothing at all, determining that there were simply no grounds on which they and the GOP could be satisfied -- at least for now. 
 
 "There is a closet full of triggers that people have suggested," Reid said, adding that he had lengthy conversations with Obama administration officials about them, but had no partner from the GOP side. 
 
 "We talked for an hour and a half on different triggers. I came to a conclusion we are negotiating with ourselves," Reid said. 
 
 This doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility triggers will find a way back into the legislation. 
 
 Rather, a trigger could be offered at the last minute as a means of winning a crucial GOP vote. But starting with nothing at all remains a gamble -- practically inviting Senate Republicans to shout that Democrats aren't serious about structural reforms to programs like Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. 
 
 Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he felt like some Republicans were warming up to the Reid plan, but the acrimony was high between McConnell and Democratic leaders. 
 
 McConnell offered to hold a vote immediately on Reid's bill, but Reid refused, because it would need a 60-vote majority to pass, and Democrats do not yet have seven Republicans to join them. 
 
 Reid countered on the Senate floor that he'd be happy to have a simple, majority vote, like in the House, and McConnell scoffed. "Let me say this is almost an out-of-body experience," he said. 
 
 "It is obvious to the world, there is now another filibuster," Reid shot back. 
 
 Reid and Schumer both complained that McConnell has refused lately to negotiate, and Reid said that McConnell called him Friday evening to say he would not enter discussions with him -- only with President Obama. McConnell spokesman Don Stewart countered that McConnell simply wants the president involved to ensure Obama won't reject the measure at the last minute. 
 
 According to Stewart, although there's no meeting set with Reid and his boss, staff-level talks are ongoing. 
 
 In terms of the mechanics of the three-stage debt hike, it looks like another major compromise by the Democrats, and adopts a plan first proposed by McConnell. In the scheme, Congress would give the White House the authority to raise the debt limit, while retaining only the authority to disapprove by a supermajority vote. 
 
 A first increase would be a two-part jump that would hike the debt cap by $1.2 trillion, with the first $416 billion being free from any disapproval. That step would ensure a default is avoided if the measure is passed quickly. 
 
 The Senate and House could object to the rest of that money. The next $1.2 trillion would be authorized after the president certifies that the nation is within $150 billion of the new ceiling. 
 
 From the start of the debate, Democrats have moved from insisting there be no strings attached to raising the borrowing cap to now adding $2.4 trillion in cuts and an enforcement mechanism. They've also been adamant that the hike would have to last through the election season. This new three-step model edges away from that, but since it would be so hard to stop the White House from acting, they see it as almost as good. 
 
 One senior Democrat speculated McConnell was less interested in his own idea now because he had gotten hammered by the right for it. 
 
 Democrats were also quick to point out that, while McConnell mocked the idea of a simple majority vote on the debt ceiling Friday, he reportedly pushed for one back in April as a way to let Democrats take all the blame for raising the limit, which was less popular with the public at the time. 
 
 In order for the deal to happen now, it may take the White House to sign off. It also may take one more major compromise on the trigger. 
 
 Schumer told reporters, "The problem with a trigger is this: Republicans insist that it have no revenues and we insist it must have some revenues and some [saving]... So you will not get a trigger. No one has come up with a way to bridge that gap." 
 
 The country hits the debt limit at midnight on Aug. 2, and while some reports suggest revenues have been stronger than expected -- meaning there could be a few more days of wiggle room -- the country would begin the process of failing to pay its bills as the calendar turns to Aug. 3. 
 
 How The Revised Reid Amendment Compares To The Revised Boehner Bill
– It's Harry Reid's turn to hit legislative turbulence. The House today rejected the Senate leader's plan to raise the debt ceiling in a move seen largely as symbolic, reports AP. The real fight, however, is taking place in the Senate, where GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a letter to Reid signed by 43 Republicans vowing to oppose his plan when it comes up for a vote set for 1am EST Sunday. Those numbers guarantee that Reid would not be able to fend off a filibuster, reports the Washington Post. “It isn’t going to pass,” said McConnell, who demanded that the White House rejoin negotiations. “Let’s get talking to the administration.” The big hope to avoid a default is that Reid and McConnell can somehow forge a bipartisan compromise, but the two were mainly sniping at each other today, notes Politico. “We welcome compromise,” Reid said. “As recently as yesterday, I asked my friend, the Senate minority leader, to help make this Senate compromise more palatable, but we have heard very little from Republicans.”