Posted on 12/29/2012 10:22:33 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Looks like John Boehner may get his wish. After his Plan B collapsed, Boehner has insisted that the ball is in the Senate’s court, as the House has already passed legislation that would resolve the fiscal cliff. The Hill reports that Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are now working on a plan that they will reveal sometime tomorrow — as the eleventh hour ticks away:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are working on an agreement to avoid across-the-board tax hikes and plan to show it to colleagues Sunday.
Senate leaders emerged optimistic from a Friday afternoon meeting at the White House with President Obama, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.). Vice President Biden and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also attended. …
Both Reid and McConnell sounded hopeful they could craft an agreement over the next 24 to 36 hours, although Reid said he was under no illusion that members of his caucus would accept it without complaint.
“I’m going to do everything I can. I’m confident Sen. McConnell will do the same. But … whatever we come up with is going to be imperfect. Some people aren’t going to like it. Some people will like it less. But that’s where we are,” Reid said.
Reid has scheduled a Democratic caucus meeting for Sunday afternoon to give his colleagues a chance to weigh in on a potential deal.
McConnell said he would do the same.
“We are engaged in discussions — the majority leader and myself and the White House — in the hopes that we can come forward as early as Sunday and have a recommendation that I can make to my conference,” McConnell said. “And so we’ll be working hard to try to see if we can get there in the next 24 hours.”
I’ll guess at the relative terms of the deal. It will lock in the Bush-era tax rates permanently for those earning below $400,000 — a heady bit of symbolism, as that’s the salary for the President — and allow rates above that to rise to 39.6%. It will patch the AMT — again — and address the other less-known aspects of the fiscal cliff. There probably won’t be much done to fix the sequester cuts at all, at least not immediately. That will end up waiting for the debt-ceiling fight, which will come in a couple of months, unless Democrats are willing to sweeten the pot to get a one-year extension as part of this deal.
If that’s the proposal, will Boehner go for it? Almost certainly; according to The Hill, he’s agreed in principle to allow an immediate floor vote on any bill the Senate can pass. If the Senate gets a bill passed purely on Democratic votes, then Boehner will probably instruct his caucus to vote “present” and let Democrats own the results. If it gets significant Republican support, the House vote will probably flow smoothly enough to allow conservatives worried about primary challenges to oppose it, and have Democrats do the heavy lifting for passage.
If that sounds as if this deal could have been struck weeks ago — or perhaps years ago — well, that just means you’ve been paying attention. Now all sides are worried about the fallout from failure, and anything will look better than nothing to some. Not to all, of course, and there will be still some substantial effort made on both sides to hold out for total victory, but leadership on both sides have squeezed out all of the painless good will they can from this standoff. The sooner they get this off the table, the more time they have until the next election for everyone to forget what a joke this turned out to be.
There will be no deal. Why waste the holiday weekend when they screwed up all year long?
the senate democrats know that lil’ barry’s demands are a death blow for the economy, that’s why they extended the “Bush tax cuts” before the elections in 2010
this is about saving face for them while throwing a bone to that little 14 yr old (mentally) ideologue wannabe marxist sitting in the WH
the debt ceiling fight won’t (can’t) wait a month, it will start next week. Until then the govt will pay its bills with accounting chicanery and money “borrowed” from the federal employee pension fund
Yet another round of last minute “emergency” legislation that will have to passed before it can be read.
At this point, just let the whole thing go over the cliff. The pubs are going to be blamed anyway so why not go for the gusto?
As a fundamental matter, the very fact that we are facing an imminent fiscal cliff is an indictment of the country’s “leadership”, starting with the president. We go from crisis to crisis. The only thing our representatives do well is give speeches and devise ways to delay meaningful actions. Meanwhile, the ever growing debt threatens to destroy us.
Face it folks; no politician in either party thinks we can ever balance the budget again. If they did they would not be engaged in bitter battles about how to shave a mere $200 Billion off a deficit that totals $1002 Billion. What about the fiscal cliff which both sides fear like it was Armageddon? It only reduces the red ink by $464 Billion leaving a hole of more than half a Trillion dollars. If cutting spending and increasing revenues enough to reduce the deficit to $538 Billion will crash the economy and send us all to financial ruin how in the hell can we ever get it to zero?
“Reid, McConnell working on new fiscal-cliff plan (Agreement hopefully to come this Sunday)”
Just some questions, but aren’t tax and appropriation legislation supposed to originate in THE HOUSE?
Shouldn’t it be the House passing a bill FIRST, after which it is taken into consideration by the Senate?
Why should either Harry Reid or Mitch McConnell have anything to do with it, at this stage of the process?
The putsch by the Obama administration to use the Senate to “lead” on this matter is an end-run around the Constitution, even moreso an attempt to render the House Republican majority irrelevant to the legislative process. The idea is to have something from the Senate, and then wave it in front of the news media and the public and claim that the House “isn’t going along”, when the House should be the step in the process.
I don’t blame the Republican members of the House for “holding out” as long as they have.
I -DO- point my finger directly at the Republican Senators, who should have refused to participate at all until after the House had passed a bill and forwarded it to the Senate for consideration.
The Republicans in the Senate who cooperate with the ‘rats on this maneuver are betraying their fellow lawmakers in the House, as well as the American people.
Remindful of Thomas Jefferson's one wise bit of advice he offered to young Peter Carr:
"Nothing is so mistaken as the supposition, that a person is to extricate himself from a difficulty, by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice. This increases the difficulties ten fold; and those who pursue these methods, get themselves so involved at length, that they can turn no way but their infamy becomes more exposed. It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions." -- See "Letter to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785," in Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1984), pp. 814-815.
From "fast and furious" to Benghazi, from Obamacare to the so-called "fiscal cliff," do we not see examples of such "chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice"?
The guises by which Americans are being deceived into surrendering their liberty grow more numerous every day. Truly, Jefferson summed it up well, "there is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible" as this kind of habitual deceit--especially when it is by an Administration elected to "preserve and protect" "the People's" Constitutional protections for liberty.
What possibly could go wrong?
In other words, tax increases for those above $400,000 and nothing on the spending side. The bottom line is that the dems will have reneged on the terms of the last debt ceiling increase, just as the next debt ceiling increase rolls into center stage.
It’s painfully obvious that the democrats will not stop short of bankruptcy. If we’re doomed to go through that exercise, we might as well do it sooner rather than later. The immediate fiscal cliff deal is almost irrelevant except as a morale booster/coalition wrecker, as the case may be. The next debt ceiling fight is the opportunity. But the Republicans need to be willing to go through a government shutdown.
So ... pass a one year CR funding all essential services at last year’s level and everything else at, say, a ten percent cut. Then pass absolutely nothing else that does not proceed through both the House and Senate in regular order. No more stroke-of-midnight backroom deals.
If the dems won’t proceed on that basis, let them shut down the government. Both parties will blame the other, but we’ll have the better case. Be prepared to weather a looooong shutdown. And let the dems know that if they choose that path, a lot of things will NEVER reopen.
No telling what kind of deal these two Jag offs will come up with, but you can bet it will follow the guidelines of Barrack Obama.
Article I, Section 7 of the US Constitutionsays: “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.”
Since a bill originating in the Senate to raise revenue is, prima facie, unconstitutional, we are duty bound to disobey.
The R’s will do what the R leadership does best, (Am I allowed to say bend over and hold their ankles) satisfy the democrats.
I have to agree with you.
After the November election and all of this fiscal cliff BS, I’m planning on sitting out the next election...
remake of dumb and dumber
Oh please, please help us. We need you to come up with a plan to save the world. We are sinking and cannot go on without your help. Mitch, Harry the fate of the world is in your hands tonight. RIGHT!!!
He WANTS to go over the cliff....there is no downside for him...
Reid and Obama already planned to go over the cliff...Reid is just playing the role...of statesman (hurl) to look like he tried..
Reid: "Gee...we Senate democrats really tried hard but the GOP simply would not meet us halfway, so we failed. I lay the blame squarely on the minority leader doorstep"
Why has the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, been foolish enough to allow himself to be pushed forward into the spotlight while the House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, has done everything possible to disappear so that she and her Democratic colleagues will have no part of the blame for the almost certain failure of the fiscal-cliff negotiations?
Since the House Republicans have voted no to John Boehner’s Plan B, which would have raised taxes on high earners, the chances of them approving the same proposal if put forward by Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell is virtually nil.
But there Mitch McConnell will be in front of the cameras as the U.S. economy goes over the cliff, with Harry Reid backing away out of the picture, soon to join Nancy Pelosi for an all-out attack on the Republicans for causing every misery the people of America are about to face.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
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