senators on ballot. a lot of those internal machinations are what s driving this. i think it s going to be another day at least until we know what they re going to work out. yeah, yeah. hey, perry, looking at one of your recent articles, three groups that define the government shutdown, can you break that down? obviously the democrats are president obama, the senate democrats have a strong view. they want to not only they want to keep obama care as it is. they want to open the government. and they want to make sure the republicans don t continue to have this debt ceiling vat ji over and over and over again. but the republicans are pretty divided. you have one group, and you can probably put john boehner in this, republicans who want to push and reduce spending but they don t view this as an end all and be all. remember john boehner in november actually said obama care is the law of the land. he hinted they would stop fighting over it. but you have a group of republicans, part
perry, here s what senator reid said about meeting with senator mcconnell. here s that. obama care is no longer their number one issue. their number one issue is to do anything they can to divert attention from the fools they made of themselves on obama care. so we re taking nothing off the table. so if obama care is no longer the number one issue, what do republicans want? my sense is the republicans don t really know what they want. what they want more than anything else is they don t want to feel like they ve completely lost this. you heard a member of congress say a couple weeks ago, we don t want to be humiliated. he used the word humiliated by praul. the republicans realize they ve mostly lost the public relations are debate here. their poll numbers are down. obama s are up. they don t want to force a shutdown and then not get anything out of it. i think you re seeing them push toward trying to get the medical device tax in the health care law repealed. they want to get s
i think it s been very difficult to work with him. so if this is what we re hearing from these lawmakers today, does that sound like a deal is going to be reached before thursday? well, no offense to either of those republicans, but they are not really the deal makers here. harry reid is a very key player here. it is important to point out, you know, everything perry said is completely right. people don t want to lose this battle. the republicans have already gotten something out of it. the argument about how much you re spending to fund the government, it is a sequester-level spending amount. this is already a big cut in government spending. there have been a lot of cuts in government spending since the republicans took over the house. democrats keep pointing that out. you ve already gotten something. that makes it really hard to negotiate when you don t have that, you know, real incentive to hang over their head. the other big sticking point is for how long you do it. the politic
one-on-one talks with senate minority leader mitch mcconnell. joining me now, msnbc contributor perry bacon jr., and christina belantoni. perry, we have senator reid saying negotiations with senator mcconnell are in the earliest of stages but hopes to have a deal fairly soon. how realistic is that? thursday is the day. so thursday is a really big day here. neither party wants to go over the debt ceiling. i think in some ways the negotiations have to go pretty quickly if only because time is running out. i really think in particular the republican party, you saw those polls last week. the nbc poll. their party is at the lowest it s been ever on some level by the measures of that poll. so i think they don t want to, you know they ve already pushed for a shutdown. that s driven the numbers down. they don t want to go over the debt ceiling and be blamed for that as well. there s a strong incident for the republicans to find some way through this. i expect by thursday they will. okay.
talk yesterday about republican senator susan collins plan. she offered one to reopen the government with a spending bill for six month, also to lift the debt ceiling through january. senate democratic leaders rejected that. what happened there? one thing is that senate democrats are weary that the president is going to cut a deal with republicans to, as perry says, avoid default on thursday. that s not going to be something they like. so they just didn t have the votes there. it s kind of rare to see a vote like that where they put it forward on the floor when they re not confident there s support for it. these are are the early stages of the negotiation. harry reid s aides are saying there s all kinds of conversations going on behind the scenes. it s on the senate now to negotiate a deal that s going to be palpable to enough people that then when it goes over to the house, john boehner again is faced with a tough decision, even if the majority of his members don t like it but it h