All 6 Arkansans vote yes on bill

WASHINGTON - Arkansas’ entire congressional delegation voted for legislation late Wednesday to reopen the federal government and increase the country’s borrowing limit.

Mark Pryor, a Democrat, and John Boozman, a Republican, were among the 81 senators who voted to pass the bill. In the House, Rick Crawford, Tim Griffin, Steve Womack and Tom Cotton, all Republicans, were among the 285 who supported it.

Hours ahead of the chambers’ votes, all but one member of the state’s delegation had endorsed the compromise legislation. As of 6 p.m. Washington time, Cotton was still reading the bill and had not made up his mind about it, according to his spokesman, Caroline Rabbit.

Cotton, who is running against Pryor for Pryor’s Senate seat in 2014, eventually voted yes.

“I supported legislation tonight to prevent Barack Obama from risking a default on our national debt and to open parts of the government that were temporarily shut down,” Cotton said in a statement released late Wednesday.

He called the bill “far from perfect” and promised to fight for “real spending reforms.”

Boozman said it is hard to have overhaul discussions during a government shutdown.

“That’s simply not right to hold people hostage,” Boozman said. “It’s very difficult to really deal with things when you have the impact of the government shutdown.”

Womack said Republicans should have picked another way to try to get rid of President Barack Obama’s healthcare law.

“It was pretty clear to me that this was not going to be a battle that we could win. Shutting down government and threatening default are not winning strategies,” Womack said.

He said many of his constituents didn’t support shutting down the federal government over the health-care law.

“They may not like Obamacare, very few do, but they recognized that it’s a futile effort while this guy is in the White House,” Womack said.

The final bill was drawn from a plan developed over the weekend by 14 senators: seven Republicans, one Independent and six Democrats - including Pryor.

The group was gathered by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who said she and other senators were fed up with the rhetoric and decided to “come out of our partisan corners, stop fighting and start legislating.”

Others involved were Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H; Joe Donnelly, D-Ind.; and Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D.

On the Senate floor Wednesday, Pryor’s peers praised him for his role in the group.

Collins said Pryor was one of the first to join the group that was “united by our determination to show we could compromise.”

The group called it “Plan B.”

“The problem was there just wasn’t a ‘Plan A,’” Pryor said Wednesday. He spent the days leading up to Tuesday night in meetings and on the phone negotiating a plan with his colleagues.

He said the idea was “if we work together, we can solve these problems and that starts with putting aside the rhetoric. We can do this if cooler heads prevail.”

The final bill differs from the initial plan put forward by the group of 14. Pryor said he had wanted a year-long increase in the debt ceiling - something that didn’t make it into the final bill - as a way to ensure U.S. financial stability.

“I don’t think the markets are going to like this short term debt ceiling,” he said. “It’s not that [our] economics are unsound, it’s not that the nation is bad. It’s that there are too many people up here who just can’t govern, they just can’t let the politics go long enough to govern, and that’s a real problem.”

Several conservative and Tea Party groups quickly spoke out against the Senate plan after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced it around noon Wednesday. Others went to social media to urge Republicans to vote against it.

Heritage Action for America warned that it would include the vote as a “key vote” on its legislative scorecard.

Americans for Limited Government called the vote an “unconditional surrender” on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

“No Republican who votes for the Harry Reid surrender bill will ever be able to credibly claim that they truly oppose Obamacare, because when push came to shove, they chose to fund and implement it,” group president Nathan Mehrens said in a statement.

Griffin dismissed such groups as being interested only in money and conflict.

“I don’t really give a rip what the groups say. The groups are some of the geniuses that designed this nightmare of a path we’ve been on,” Griffin said.

He said they convinced people across the country that they could repeal the health-care overhaul.

“That’s just nonsensical, and that’s why we are in this mess,” Griffin said.

The Club for Growth, a major donor to Cotton’s 2012 House campaign, urged members to vote against the bill.

“There are no significant changes to Obamacare, nothing on the other major entitlements that are racked with trillions in unfunded liabilities, and no meaningful spending cuts either. If this bill passes, Congress will kick the can down the road, yet again,” said a letter sent to congressional offices and the media.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a release saying it also would include the vote in its legislative scorecard, but it urged Congress to approve the plan.