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Another GOP Senator Doesn’t Trust Paul Ryan

(Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
(Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Another Senate Republican has conceded he doesn’t entirely trust House Budget Chairman Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis.

This time, it’s Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, R-Pa., a member of the ill-fated deficit reduction supercommittee. For months, we’ve been following the repeated attempts by Senate Democrats to get to a conference on next year’s budget resolution and the repeated GOP objections.

On Monday morning on MSNBC, Toomey refused to back Ryan or other House Republicans to negotiate budget deals with Democrats:

“Harry Reid is going to have to deal with Republican conferees in the House,” Scarborough said. “You certainly trust Paul Ryan, don’t you, to do the right thing?”

“Earlier this year, it was Republicans in the House that suspended the debt ceiling concept altogether for a period of time.” Toomey replied. “They said, ‘let’s just the pretend there’s no debt ceiling and allow the government to just keep borrowing. I disagreed with that decision.”

The other side, which includes Toomey, Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas and some others, wants a requirement that the budget resolution won’t be used as the vehicle for raising the debt limit with a simple majority vote.

As noted previously on this blog, that concern supposes that Cruz does not trust his House counterparts to not cut a deal that allows a debt ceiling increase as part of a broader package.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said on Monday that the administration wouldn’t reprise the debt limit debate.

“We’re not going to negotiate. … We’re just not,” Carney said.

Carney’s message lined up with comments made last week by Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

 

 

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