Reid Offers Budget Conference If House GOP Relents - East Idaho News
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Reid Offers Budget Conference If House GOP Relents

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Getty 100213 HarryReid?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1380740856730Mark Wilson/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner Wednesday offering to convene a budget conference only if House Republicans pass a clean six-week funding measure.

“Now we find ourselves at a loggerheads.  There needs to be a path forward to reopen our Government and protect our economy.  This is a communication to you offering a sensible, reasonable compromise,” Reid said in the letter.

Just hours before congressional leaders headed to the White House to meet with President Obama, Reid and Boehner spoke by phone in a conversation Reid described as “cordial.”

“My message to him was very simple: We have to stop playing these foolish games that keep coming to us from the other side of the Capitol,” Reid said in a news conference.

But Republicans said Reid’s negotiation offer rests on the presumption that House Republicans will agree to a clean continuing resolution, a measure they’ve opposed throughout the shutdown fight.

“The entire government is shut down right now because Washington Democrats refuse to even talk about fairness for all Americans under ObamaCare,” Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, said. “Offering to negotiate only after Democrats get everything they want is not much of an offer.”

House Republicans proposed a conference on the continuing resolution as a way to end the shutdown earlier this week, but the Senate voted against it on Tuesday.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

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