House Speaker John Boehner just wanted to sneak out of the White House for a smoke. 
 
 But President Barack Obama pulled him aside for a grilling. Obama wanted to know why they were in the second day of a government shutdown that the speaker had repeatedly and publicly pledged to avoid. 
 
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 “John, what happened?” Obama asked, according to people briefed on the Oct. 2 conversation. 
 
 “I got overrun, that’s what happened,” Boehner said. 
 
 (WATCH: Who won the shutdown? Top 5 quotes) 
 
 It may be the most concise explanation of a chaotic, 16-day standoff that prompted the first government shutdown in nearly two decades and ended only hours before the world’s largest economy nearly exhausted its ability to pay the bills. The fiscal drama turned on a series of complicated relationships, internecine Republican warfare and rare Democratic unity. 
 
 The House Republican conference ran roughshod over Boehner, a 22-year veteran of Washington who started the fight demanding to strip funds for Obamacare but settled in the end for the reaffirmation of a minor provision already in the law. 
 
 (PHOTOS: The government reopens) 
 
 He was overtaken by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who swept in near the end to forge a bipartisan agreement, part of an attempt to shield Republicans from further damage and salvage his party’s chances of winning back the Senate next year. 
 
 A particular low point came Oct. 1 when Democrats released private emails to POLITICO aimed at making Boehner look like a hypocrite. The emails showed that Boehner had actually been deeply engaged in fixing an Obamacare glitch that would have cost lawmakers and their staff thousands of extra dollars. Hill veterans weren’t quite as shocked by the flip-flop as the utter breakdown of decorum between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Boehner. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Obama’s latest push features a familiar strategy) 
 
 Above all, Republicans never believed Obama would hold firm on his refusal to negotiate and Democrats would maintain an unusual level of cohesion — united by a visceral desire to put the tea party in its place and an almost mama grizzly instinct to protect Obamacare. 
 
 “It was not a smart play,” McConnell said Thursday of the GOP’s Obamacare strategy. “It had no chance of success.” 
 
 Obama and Reid stuck together, emerging as the political victors. Their hard-ball tactics were designed to “break the fever” brought on by the tea party, but it also helped drive the country to the edge of default. 
 
 Republicans cycled through every option possible during the three-week standoff to save face. Their Obamacare demands devolved from repeal and defund to a delay of the individual mandate. They revived the idea of a “grand bargain” on taxes and government spending but Reid openly laughed when Boehner raised it during a White House meeting. They offered a more narrow proposal to replace the sequester cuts for two years. Then, they went back to Obamacare. 
 
 (PHOTOS: Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid’s friendship) 
 
 Nothing worked. 
 
 When things were at their worst, some Republican senators urged Vice President Joe Biden to get more involved. But he told each of them it wasn’t his call. Biden participated in meetings at the White House but Reid, still angry about the vice president’s concessions during the fiscal cliff talks last December, had shut him out of direct negotiations with lawmakers this time around. 
 
 By Wednesday, Republicans just needed a way out, agreeing to a bill that looked almost identical to what they rejected three weeks earlier: a debt-limit increase until Feb. 7, an extension of federal funding through Jan. 15 and no binding strings attached. 
 
 (Also on POLTICO: Shutdown aftermath: John Harris, Todd Purdum assess damage) 
 
 This account of the behind-the-scenes drama was drawn from dozens of interviews with key players in Congress and at the White House. The look back reveals how Republicans waged a fight on Obamacare that their leaders knew they would probably lose but pushed anyways because many in their ranks truly believed that Democrats, like they’ve done so often before, would fold — especially under the threat of an historic default on U.S. debt. 
 
 McConnell told his colleagues this week that his party should “never” be put in the same political position again. 
 
 “We fought the good fight,” Boehner told WLW radio on Wednesday. “We just didn’t win.” 
 
 (PHOTOS: John Boehner’s life and career) 
 
 The buildup to shutdown 
 
 Any hope of an easy debt limit extension was dashed in late August when Boehner promised a “whale of a fight.” 
 
 Obama and Reid got on the same page early on, agreeing during strategy sessions over the summer that they wouldn’t give up anything until Republicans renewed the debt limit and government funding. 
 
 Democrats never believed that Boehner could deliver the 217 House votes he needed to cut a deal. He could shut down the government and risk default, but because of hard-line conservatives, Boehner couldn’t pass anything. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Obama and Reid this privately, and she repeated it publicly. This belief drove the Democrats throughout the crisis: stand firm and Boehner will be forced to fold. 
 
 (WATCH: Nancy Pelosi blasts GOP for budget saga) 
 
 But they had to keep each other in check. 
 
 Reid nixed an idea in mid-September to invite the congressional leaders over to the White House for a talk. It sends the wrong message, Reid argued to Obama in a call. We shouldn’t even create the appearance of a negotiation, Reid said. 
 
 The meeting never happened. 
 
 In the House, Boehner and his leadership team ran through a spate of options — none of which his conference would accept. First, the Ohio Republican proposed keeping the debt limit and government-funding discussions separate, which Democrats were privately hoping would happen. He suggested passing a budget bill that completely funded the Affordable Care Act. A resolution would be passed alongside that defunded the law, but it could’ve been stripped out by the Senate and sent to Obama’s desk. 
 
 The proposal was dubbed the “Cantor plan,” after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who came up with the idea. Then, Boehner would’ve had Republicans fight hard on the debt ceiling, using the sequester as a bargaining chip against Obama. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Mitch McConnell defends deal, slams Obamacare tactics) 
 
 But that’s where Boehner miscalculated: he assumed House Republicans only wanted a show vote. Instead, they wanted so much more, determined to nullify the health care law and use a government shutdown and threat of a debt-limit default to get there. 
 
 Boehner’s rank-and-file were being egged on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a populist freshman who was quickly gaining followers in the House as quickly as he was alienating his fellow Republicans senators. 
 
 In the run-up to the shutdown, Obama was weak politically; his Syria strategy was panned by both parties; Obamacare was suffering poor poll numbers; and Republicans thought they had him on the ropes. 
 
 (WATCH: Timeline of Ted Cruz’s Obamacare crusade) 
 
 Yet Cruz’s anti-Obamacare drive played right into Democratic hands. 
 
 “The president gets up every day and reads the newspaper and thanks God that Ted Cruz is in the United States Senate,” a Republican senator pointedly told Cruz at a closed-door meeting. 
 
 Even amiable and soft-spoken Republicans like John Boozman of Arkansas tore apart Cruz in a private GOP meeting, saying he was making GOP senators seem like they were for Obamacare when they had fought so hard to torpedo it. Boozman pointedly told Cruz he hadn’t been bullied since middle school, and he wouldn’t be bullied now. 
 
 Follow @politico ||||| The sun rises on the U.S. Capitol dome as the prayer group Faithful Filibuster — Carol Busroe, Gary Cook, Jim Wallis and Ray East — pray for a solution to end the shutdown and extend the Treasury Department’s borrowing power. 
 
 Oct. 16, 2013 The sun rises on the U.S. Capitol dome as the prayer group Faithful Filibuster — Carol Busroe, Gary Cook, Jim Wallis and Ray East — pray for a solution to end the shutdown and extend the Treasury Department’s borrowing power. Melina Mara/The Washington Post 
 
 The federal government is in the third week of a shutdown while Congress worked out a deal to fund its operations and to avoid a possible default because of the debt limit. 
 
 Meanwhile, furloughed federal workers expressed their displeasure as the government shutdown headed into its third week. 
 
 Meanwhile, furloughed federal workers expressed their displeasure as the government shutdown headed into its third week. 
 
 Senate leaders began negotiations Saturday aimed at reopening federal agencies and avoiding a government default after every other effort to end Congress’s impasse crumbled in the previous 48 hours. 
 
 Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took over the talks, which had led nowhere in recent days. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) acknowledged early Saturday that his discussions with President Obama had collapsed and that the Senate was the last hope to avert a financial disaster. 
 
 McConnell and Reid held an hour-long meeting in Reid’s office with two close Senate allies and left the Capitol by mid-afternoon. Late Saturday night neither side cited any progress, and Republicans reported that Democrats were dug in on their demand to increase funding for federal agencies. 
 
 During the fiscal crises that have gripped Capitol Hill over the past five years, each resolution and compromise came after Senate leaders picked up the pieces of failed efforts between the White House and the House. 
 
 In the morning session, Reid rejected a proposal crafted by rank-and-file Republicans with some Democratic input to raise the federal debt limit until Jan. 31 and fund federal agencies through the end of March. It also called for minor adjustments to Obama’s health-care law . 
 
 Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) addressed the shutdown during a press conference on Capitol Hill on Saturday, saying Susan Collins's plan to end the shutdown and extend the debt ceiling is "not going to go any place." (AP) 
 
 At an afternoon news conference, Reid said he wanted a shorter period for stopgap funding and a longer extension of the Treasury’s borrowing authority. Reid particularly wants to scale back deep automatic spending cuts known as the sequester, which were passed during the 2011 debt-ceiling showdown and will take effect every January for the next decade, unless Congress amends them. 
 
 Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, called that issue “really the single biggest sticking point.” 
 
 The slow-moving talks appeared to nix earlier hopes that at least an outline for a deal could be in place before the financial markets opened Monday, as some senior senators suggested when momentum seemed to be building toward a plan by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). 
 
 Senate Republicans — already stunned by Boehner’s inability to pass anything in the House — grew furious about Reid’s attempt to get relief from the sequester because they considered Collins’s plan the fastest path to a deal. 
 
 “This thing has gotten to the point of a real crisis for the country, and everybody keeps changing their position based on politics,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) said after a long huddle on the Senate floor with McConnell and other Republicans. 
 
 It was a dramatic turnabout from Thursday morning, when Boehner’s leadership team signaled that it would support increasing the debt ceiling until almost Thanksgiving with the only demand being that Obama negotiate over a broader budget framework in the interim. With pressure on the debt issue appearing to ease, financial markets staged their biggest rally in a month. 
 
 The president, however, rejected Boehner’s offer because it did not address reopening the government, which has been closed since Oct. 1. Instead, the White House grew interested in the Senate talks over Collins’s plan because of its longer debt-ceiling window. According to the administration, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will run out of options after Thursday for juggling the nation’s books, and by the end of the month, the Treasury will run out of cash to pay the government’s bills. 
 
 Collins, along with GOP Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), worked with Democrats to draw up a 23-page draft that would have ended the shutdown and funded federal agencies for six months at current spending levels. It would have left intact the sequestration cuts scheduled to hit Jan. 15 but would have given agency officials flexibility to decide where the reductions should occur. 
 
 In addition, the proposal would raise the debt limit through Jan. 31, setting up a path for the two sides to have broad budget talks to try to tackle the issues of taxes and entitlement reform. 
 
 In exchange, Republicans sought tweaks to Obama’s Affordable Care Act, including a two-year delay of a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices that is unpopular in both parties. 
 
 Reid and McConnell met with two allies who had been working with Collins — Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) — when Reid rejected that plan but the talks continued. 
 
 Democrats want a shorter extension of government funding so that they can try to press the Republicans, whose party’s image has been battered in recent weeks, for more savings from the sequestration cuts in negotiations that would take place in the near term — rather than waiting until March, when the spending cuts will have taken effect. 
 
 In addition, Reid told reporters that he will make no concessions on the health-care law. 
 
 The Reid-McConnell negotiations will test a relationship that has been deeply frayed in the past three years, when McConnell has served as a key closer on several fiscal deals but has done so by going around Reid to Vice President Biden. 
 
 Rather than focusing on the acrimonious days, however, Reid recalled their bipartisan work together nine years ago to revamp the Senate’s oversight of national security agencies. But he warned that a deal will take time. 
 
 “We don’t have anything done yet, and a long ways to go before anything like that will happen,” he said. 
 
 If an agreement were reached, time would become a factor. Unless every senator agreed to expedite the process — including conservative firebrands such as Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) — it would take until at least late in the week to clear the Senate. 
 
 The bill would then go to the House, where it would face an uncertain fate. 
 
 Boehner’s closest friends in the Senate, including Graham and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), pleaded with him Friday to modify his legislation along the lines of what they were trying to broker across the Capitol. The speaker told them Saturday that the Collins plan would face opposition from too many Republicans for him to put it on the floor, Chambliss said. 
 
 “We don’t support it,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters, saying that the reasons for opposition were “too many to go into.” 
 
 In a raucous meeting in the Capitol basement Saturday morning, Boehner told his Republican colleagues that talks between the House GOP and Obama had broken down. He and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) urged members to hold firm, several said, as McConnell and Reid worked on a deal. 
 
 “All eyes are now on the Senate,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). 
 
 The leaders, however, began the meeting trying to prepare their troops for the likelihood that they would have to adopt a deal cut in the Senate. Both leaders explained that the White House is no longer willing to negotiate with the House, that McConnell and Reid were talking, and that a bipartisan agreement is likely to emerge that will need the House’s approval. 
 
 But instead of absorbing this painful reality, some rank-and-file Republicans grew visibly excited about the prospect of opposing such a deal, said one person in the room. This defiance was fed by Ryan, who stood up and railed against the Collins proposal, saying the House could not accept either a debt-limit bill or a government-funding measure that would delay the next fight until the new year. 
 
 According to two Republicans familiar with the exchange, Ryan argued that the House would need those deadlines as “leverage” for delaying the health-care law’s individual mandate and adding a “conscience clause” — allowing employers and insurers to opt out of birth-control coverage if they find it objectionable on moral or religious grounds — and mentioned tax and entitlement goals Ryan had focused on in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. 
 
 Ryan’s speech appeared only to further rile up the conservative wing of the GOP conference, which has been agitating the shutdown strategy to try to tear apart the health-care law. 
 
 With such fervor still rampant among House Republicans, there was bipartisan agreement in the Senate that Boehner’s House had lost its ability to approve anything that could be signed by Obama into law. Republicans decided the Senate must act first, hoping that the pressure of the Thursday debt deadline would lead to the House passing the measure even if it meant just a small collection of the GOP’s House majority joined with the Democratic minority to approve a deal. 
 
 “At this point, they have dealt themselves out of this process. They cannot agree among themselves,” Durbin said. “And that makes it extremely difficult to take them seriously.” 
 
 Rosalind S. Helderman, Jackie Kucinich and Jeff Simon contributed to this report. ||||| Ominous clouds fill the sky in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Democrats and Republicans are still at a stalemate on funding for the federal government as the shutdown goes into a seventh day. 
 
 Oct. 7, 2013 Ominous clouds fill the sky in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Democrats and Republicans are still at a stalemate on funding for the federal government as the shutdown goes into a seventh day. Mark Wilson/Getty Images 
 
 From federal office buildings to the national parks and memorials, sights around Washington and across the country are closed after Congress failed to pass a funding bill. 
 
 From federal office buildings to the national parks and memorials, sights all around Washington and across the country were closed Tuesday after Congress failed to pass a funding bill. 
 
 From federal office buildings to the national parks and memorials, sights all around Washington and across the country were closed Tuesday after Congress failed to pass a funding bill. 
 
 Everything is different this time. 
 
 The fiscal showdowns of the past three years have all followed a familiar script: chapter and verse leading to a messy but predictable end. First came the pseudo-negotiators, working away on preliminary proposals and hoping to avoid calamity. Secretly, President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) would then decide to go big, aiming for a major bipartisan deal worthy of the moment. 
 
 Then came the breakup, the inevitable, acrimonious crash and burn. 
 
 Finally, the town elders would rush in and save the day with a desperately negotiated deal that no one loved, but which prevented the federal government from going over the cliff. That’s how it worked with the 2011-debt ceiling negotiations and the New Year’s Day pact to avoid the “fiscal cliff.” 
 
 Not this time. A different set of political dynamics has upended the old playbook, and a resolution to this fiscal crisis seems especially remote. Obama, Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) remain far apart, having occasional phone calls but no substantive negotiations. 
 
 View Graphic House shutdown vote tracker: See which Republicans say they will vote for a “clean” spending bill to end the shutdown. 
 
 Boehner, having barely survived a coup attempt from within his own ranks, has vowed to steer clear of any one-on-one talks with Obama. The president, freshly reelected but facing questions from his left flank about his backbone, dug in months ago, vowing not to get involved in any horse trading with Boehner over the issue of increasing Treasury’s borrowing authority. 
 
 Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the elder statesmen who have closed most recent fiscal deals, have stayed on the sidelines. 
 
 That left Reid, itching for a showdown, eager to rewrite the annals of recent negotiations in Washington by drawing a line in the sand and refusing to budge. 
 
 “In the art of negotiation, you have to get to a place where you give both sides the ability to save face,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said Tuesday. That place remained distant as of Tuesday night. 
 
 The behind-the-scenes moves, so far, have been defined by what isn’t happening. No substantive negotiations took place Tuesday, the first day of a government shutdown, just as no substantive negotiations took place Monday or Sunday. 
 
 Some House Republicans, who have largely driven this strategy against the wishes of most veteran GOP lawmakers, rejoiced at having avoided direct talks with Obama and instead passing bills without any heavily negotiated process. They have been shuttling legislation to Reid’s Senate, where it has been repeatedly rejected by his Democratic majority. 
 
 “We’re back to regular order. We’re doing it the right way,” Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.), a junior member of the GOP leadership, said Tuesday as she exited another closed-door meeting of House Republicans. 
 
 The “regular order” being touted by Republicans is markedly different from what happened in previous showdowns. In the spring, facing criticism that he lacked any personal bonds with lawmakers, Obama hosted a series of dinner parties, with a particular emphasis on Senate Republicans. 
 
 Out of those meals came the “Diners Club,” a semi-regular group of GOP senators who tried working with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on longer-range fiscal issues. 
 
 This group became the latest incarnation of the pseudo-negotiators who have toiled away in the early stages of fiscal deals. In May and June 2011, Biden and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) led an ad hoc group tasked with coming up with budget savings in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling. That group was loosely modeled on another group of four lawmakers who served as early negotiators before a December 2010 tax deal was reached between Biden and McConnell. 
 
 The Biden-Cantor group didn’t clinch a deal, but came up with a menu of options worth more than $2 trillion in savings — a level of success the Diners Club didn’t come close to approaching. Off and on over a few months, the eight GOP senators met with McDonough but could never agree on much. They discussed grand bargains and mini-grand bargains, but the Republicans could never deliver the increased tax revenue the White House sought to buffer the automatic spending cuts, known as sequestration, that resulted in the eventual 2011 debt deal. 
 
 “There is no next step,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said after the last Diners Club meeting in August. 
 
 The second and third acts never happened in this round of negotiations, mostly because of the bitter memories of the Obama-Boehner talks. In July 2011 and again in December 2012, Obama and Boehner engaged in secretive talks that were aimed at a grand bargain that would have resulted in $4 trillion in savings over a decade, much bigger than their deputies had been willing to consider. 
 
 Both times they grew very close, and both negotiations moved within reach of a historic deal. 
 
 Yet each negotiation ended in bad breakup, as Boehner ran into trouble with his GOP caucus as word leaked he was considering $1 trillion in new tax revenue. Conservatives were furious, and rank-and-file lawmakers complained they learned about the status of talks through the media. It left Boehner weakened, and he nearly lost his reelection bid in January for a second term as speaker amid a conservative revolt. 
 
 Republicans mapped out a new approach for 2013. It included reordering their legislative priorities, but also made clear that Boehner would not repeat those talks with Obama. “We’re not going to do things the way we did in the 112th,” Rep. Steve Southerland II (R-Fla.), a new member of the leadership, said in an interview this year. “He’s going back to a team concept.” 
 
 Obama also decided he did not want a repeat of 2011 and 2012. White House officials have blamed that on their inability to trust the speaker’s ability to deliver results, but it also comes from their decision in early 2012 to avoid protracted talks on Capitol Hill and instead try to elevate the president above the fray. 
 
 Democratic allies have complained that when Obama — or Biden as his stand-in — delves into the details, he ends up giving away too much. In the past few weeks, Obama has repeatedly reached Boehner by phone — not to negotiate, but instead to remind him that he’s not negotiating. 
 
 That has left Reid as the main point of contact for Republicans, and the Senate leader has insisted on a daily basis that he will not haggle with Boehner over GOP demands to defund Obama’s health-care law, instead telling the speaker to pass the Senate’s continuing resolution that would reopen the government. 
 
 “So our negotiation is over with. And I’ve said that for two weeks. They should pass a CR. They are closing down the government. I don’t know what in the world is wrong with them,” Reid said Monday. 
 
 In previous confrontations, this would be the point at which Biden and McConnell rushed in to prevent national peril. It was those two who finalized the 2010 tax deal, the 2011 debt deal and the 2012 “fiscal cliff” pact. 
 
 For now, that seems unlikely. McConnell is fighting a two-front reelection battle, with a tea party-backed primary challenger accusing him of selling out conservative principles in his deals with Biden and a younger Democrat accusing him of being cowed by the far right. 
 
 McConnell has publicly declared that he won’t step into any talks involving increased taxes or increased spending. 
 
 Biden, meanwhile, has spent more time in the past month fanning the flames of his own presidential ambitions. A few weeks ago he attended a high-profile event in Iowa, followed by a trip to South Carolina, two of the early testing grounds of the 2016 campaign. 
 
 This has left rank-and-file lawmakers completely unsettled, with no one particularly sure how the process will unfold. 
 
 “They’ll eventually get there; they’ll eventually talk,” Coburn said. “There’ll eventually be a compromise and there’ll eventually be a way for Republicans, both sides, to save face.” 
 
 Lori Montgomery contributed to this report.
– During a White House meeting on Oct. 2, a day into the shutdown, John Boehner slipped out for a smoke. Barack Obama followed him, demanding a private explanation for the shutdown. "John, what happened?" he asked. "I got overrun, that's what happened," Boehner replied. That anecdote kicks off Politico's behind-the-scenes look at the crisis. The Wall Street Journal has one too—with different bits of insider gossip. Here are the most interesting tidbits from both: Obama and Harry Reid decided on their no-negotiation strategy over the summer, believing that Boehner could never unite his fractured caucus behind anything. Republicans never believed the pair would stick to it. Boehner and Reid initially struck a deal in which Boehner would pass a sequester-level budget with an ObamaCare-defunding rider that the Senate could simply strip out. Boehner assumed—incorrectly—that his caucus only wanted a show vote. Boehner's former chief of staff was feeding the White House intelligence, telling it that Boehner would have to fight up until the debt ceiling deadline. Reid also took to monitoring Twitter for hints on the GOP's next move—a sign of how badly communication was flowing. Many Republicans turned to Joe Biden, hoping he would intervene. Biden told them he'd been "sidelined … at the direction of the president," one rep says. Reid, bitter about the fiscal cliff deal Biden negotiated, had wanted him out. At one point, Boehner brought up the idea of a "grand bargain" at a White House meeting; Reid laughed in his face. When Paul Ryan joined the fray at an Oct. 10 meeting, he told Obama that he would "miss his moment" and derail his whole term if he didn't strike a deal. But he also made what White House aides called a "Freudian slip," saying, "We’re going to have six weeks to negotiate the debt limit." That night, aides to Boehner, Cantor, and Obama began talking about a broader budget deal, and agreed to talk more in the morning. The White House never called. When Mitch McConnell finally decided he had to broker the deal, he partnered with Lamar Alexander—angering Susan Collins, who had worked far harder on the process, only to see her own deal torpedoed. McConnell picked Alexander because he had better conservative credentials, and was pals with Reid confidante Chuck Schumer. Alexander and Schumer brokered the deal behind the scenes, then passed it off to Reid and McConnell. McConnell tells the Washington Post that he saw himself as a backup quarterback thrown into the game. "I felt like I was on the two-yard line, I had a pretty weak offensive line, and the best I could hope for was to try to punt." Boehner made one last-ditch attempt to pass an alternative. "We're running out of time," he told his caucus. "Your 'no' vote has consequences." But as Reid and Obama had predicted, he couldn't convince them. With the ball back in McConnell and Reid's court, McConnell made a few last-minute demands. Reid rejected them. It took all of 15 minutes for McConnell to call back and accept Reid's terms.