Roll Call: “A growing chorus of Republican senators support reopening the government either as part of or before any agreement to raise the debt limit, despite a House GOP plan to keep the government shuttered while taking the risk of default off the table. A significant number of GOP senators dismissed the House Republicans’ proposal either as short-sighted or out of touch with the political and economic realities of the shutdown. And at least one member of the GOP Conference said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is still active in leading conversations to resolve the current standoff.”
The Hill: “Senate Republicans have become fed up with fellow Republicans in the House and are meeting with Democrats to find a way out of the current fiscal impasse.”
“A large group of Senate Republicans is approaching influential Senate Democrats in an attempt to find a bipartisan, longer-term solution to the shutdown and debt ceiling logjam,” Politico writes. “The Republicans are floating various proposals based off the rough framework provided by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) earlier this week. The discussions were described as ‘free-flowing,’ by one source familiar with them, and include senators on a wide ideological spectrum.”
MBNBC's Suzy Khimm & NBC's Jessica Taylor look at how Collins & other GOP women have been leading the charge in negotiations. "While male leaders of both parties have barely been speaking to each other, much less negotiating, Republican women have never stopped talking to their Democratic counterparts in the Senate."
Ron Brownstein: “Embattled throughout his nearly three-year tenure, Boehner has never seemed more a SINO—that's Speaker In Name Only—than during this crisis. He's allowed the House Republicans' most conservative members to repeatedly escalate the confrontation despite his doubts about their strategy, if that word applies. At times lately, Boehner has hinted he might isolate the Right by building a coalition of Democrats and more pragmatic Republicans before allowing the federal government to default on its debts. But, so far, he's effectively thrown up his hands and surrendered the wheel to the Right's insatiable demand for collision.”