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Congressional negotiators reached a tentative deal Tuesday to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits while avoiding a fee cut for Medicare doctors, according to Republican legislators and aides.
The framework deal followed a key Republican concession Monday and could receive the endorsement of a House-Senate conference committee on Wednesday.

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However, some conservative House Republicans expressed concerns about the potential agreement and said they were unsure if they would support it.

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"It's the art of a deal. I mean, it's a compromise," said Rep. Steve Latourette, R-Ohio. "So you have people that didn't get a 100% of what they wanted."

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"I think they have to work out all the details, but I think the big scope has been agreed to," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters. However, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, was less enthusiastic, saying "this is not our preferred way" to deal with the issues and adding that details were still being studied.

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On Monday, House GOP leaders dropped their demand that any extension of the tax cut be offset by spending cuts elsewhere in the budget. The decision was a sharp turnaround for House Republicans, who previously argued that a failure to fully pay for the tax break would be financially reckless.
The debate over whether and how to extend the tax cut has been a political loser so far for the Republicans, who had publicly questioned its value last year. Democrats have gleefully highlighted the GOP's reluctance, using the issue to portray Republicans as defenders of the rich who are indifferent to the plight of the middle class.

Political analysts believe the showdown over the payroll holiday has eroded GOP strength on the party's core issue of lower taxes. Fearing negative repercussions, Republican leaders have now backtracked on the issue twice: dropping their opposition to the two-month extension last December and dropping their insistence on paying for a longer extension on Monday.

"I think the GOP has read the writing on the wall when it comes to the payroll tax cut," said Brown University political scientist Wendy Schiller. "Americans are benefiting from it, and to take it away at this juncture leaves them open to charges of raising taxes. ... It would severely hamper the GOP presidential nominee's effort to defeat Obama."

Johns Hopkins University political scientist Adam Sheingate called the GOP's latest move "a subtle shift in strategy precipitated by the improving economic outlook of the past few weeks."

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"By agreeing to a deal, the GOP can claim some credit for extending the holiday," Sheingate said. "Failing to extend the payroll tax would not only be unpopular, it would shift some of the responsibility for the economy back on the Republicans. This is to be avoided at all costs since the GOP (election) strategy rests almost entirely on Obama's handling of the economy."

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It remains unclear if the increasingly conservative House GOP caucus will be willing to go along with the tentative deal. House Republican freshmen, elected on a tidal wave of tea party support in 2010, have made deficit reduction their top priority and repeatedly insisted that any new initiatives be fully paid for.

Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Florida, said discussion Tuesday night in the House Republican caucus was "heated" over not paying for the payroll tax cut extension, which he called "bad policy," while fellow Floridian Rep. Allen West, a tea party conservative, said "this doesn't look like a good deal to me."

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Veteran political analyst Norm Ornstein warned that the GOP leadership's repeated maneuvering on the issue could end up backfiring.

House Republican leaders have been "trying to make the best of crummy situation," Ornstein told CNN. But tea party Republicans "don't care" if fighting the tax cut extension is "a political loser. They don't like the payroll tax cut and now the (leadership's) sin is being compounded by saying they won't pay for it."

This "could play out in ways that make the life of Boehner (and other Republican leaders) a little less comfortable," he predicted.

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Under the agreement that would cover the rest of 2012, the nearly $100 billion payroll tax cut would not be paid for -- a consequence of the parties' inability to compromise on either new taxes or offsetting spending cuts, said top congressional aides from both parties.

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SSI is already a broken ponzi scheme. That's not either debatable or the issue here.

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