Republicans on the deficit-reduction super committee, working closely with House Republican leaders, were close on Wednesday to offering a proposal to cut more than $1.5 trillion without raising taxes, according to congressional staffers familiar with the effort.

Word of the GOP proposal is the latest indication that both sides on the deficit panel are exchanging proposals but not concessions and that they appear to be deadlocked as their deadline looms.

While emphasizing the plan would contain no tax hikes, the two staffers provided few other details, except that it will be “revenue neutral.” It likely will include some increased government fees, however, which Republicans in previous deficit-reduction working groups had said they agreed to.

Republicans were pointing to their pending proposal at the same time that Democrats were faulting the GOP members of their 12-member Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction for rejecting a plan put forth on Tuesday by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., that was backed by most of the other super committee Democrats.

Aides confirmed to National Journal that Baucus’s proposal was loosely based on the plan put forward this summer by the Senate’s so-called Gang of Six, who met last week with the panel. The plan would about $3 trillion over 10 years, the aides said.

A Democratic aide said that most of the six Democratic committee members supported the offer, while Republicans rejected it. In particular, Senate Minority WhipJon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, were described as having clashed with Democratic members over the outline of that plan, prompting the panel to kick staff out of the room.

“We’re deadlocked,” one GOP aide said.

The stalemate comes as the deficit committee faces a mandated Nov. 23 deadline to recommend at least $1.2 trillion in deficit-reduction ideas to the rest of Congress. If that level of savings is not approved by Dec. 23, automatic, across-the-board cuts will be triggered.

Democrats also said that the GOP continues to resist adding any new revenue to a plan, preventing progress.

“We’re talking to ourselves at this point,” said a senior Democratic aide familiar with the talks.

GOP aides were citing their own forthcoming proposal as evidence that Republicans are working to find common ground. But both sides said the talks have yet to result in significant compromise.

However, according to staff, panel members—including the Republicans—are increasingly open to the idea of tapping the more than $1 billion assumed to be saved by the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Doing so is possible because estimates from the Congressional Budget Office assume higher continued spending in Iraq than is expected to occur. However, both sides generally see counting such savings as an accounting trick.

The aides said that prospect has set off sharp fights among Republicans.

Many GOP members such as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., have derided Democrats for proposals that would assume war savings. But other Republicans, particularly a contingent of defense hawks in the House, want to count the money as savings in the super committee recommendations to ease the path to finding the necessary $1.2 trillion to avoid automatic sequestration of funds in 2013. They worry that funding will take too heavy a hit with defense cuts of $600 billion over 10 years required.

The conflicts over raising new revenue and how big a deficit-reduction plan appears were also on display on Wednesday as the super committee held only its third public hearing. If the points members made during the two-hour hearing are any indication, the panel has a long way to go to reach a deal.

Members instead used much of the time making partisan points about income distribution, defense spending and savings, tax reform, and economic uncertainty. Leading questions were put to Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf, who had testified during the group’s first public-policy hearing on the drivers of the debt.

Elmendorf, though, avoided explicitly endorsing one approach over another as he carefully explained budgetary concepts, warned the committee that its decisions on discretionary spending could be voided by future Congresses, and highlighted the savings already wrung from discretionary outlays.

In one exchange, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., repeatedly tried to get Elmendorf to say that producing a small-scale plan would be worse for the economy.
“What would have a greater negative impact on growth: the failure of the committee to come up with more than $1.2 [trillion] or $1.5 trillion, or an ability to come up with a $3 trillion or $4 trillion level that had that [a] 3-to-1 or 2-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases?” Kerry asked. “Which would have a greater negative impact?”

A flummoxed Elmendorf sidestepped the question.

“I’m afraid, sir, I can’t analyze the sort of policy proposals you’re describing in my head,” he replied.