deal. well, that s problematic, but what i think we could do and the reason that i have included a provision that requires a budget conference, a long overdue budget conference, is there could be a substitution of some of the mandatory spending cuts such as the farm bill, which saves $23 billion over ten years, for some of the cuts in defense and biomedical research that are very troubling to me personally. have you spoken, either one of you, spoken to senator reid since he rejected this compromise proposal? well, i have talked to a number of people in our leadership, and i think you will see today as negotiations continue, elements of this proposal which i think is really important, and i wanted to add what susan said here. when we have a situation where we have a farm bill that had strong bipartisan support in the senate, that brings the debt down, we have a number of bills,
there s absolutely no reason ever to default, and a good leader would be saying we will never default. would a good senator be saying we will never default? absolutely. i m trying to be that. we should never default. we should never miss a payment, but people have to realize that not raising the debt ceiling means you have to balance yu budget. it doesn t mean you default, and people are conflating these two, and they re not the same thing. so your best calculation, do you think there are enough republicans in the senate to join with democrats to pass an increase in the debt ceiling? what if it came down to the wire and the only thing available was a clean debt ceiling increase, nothing on it, just increase the debt ceiling? you know, i think at this point, you know, we had a vote on saturday, yesterday, and it was to just raise it without any restrictions, and we all voted solidly against raising it without limit and without restrictions. that s what the democrats offered us y