Boehner to Obama: ‘Get serious’ about ‘fiscal cliff’

 

By Samantha R. Selman

 

Republican House Speaker John Boehner warned President Barack Obama on Wednesday that he can either accept a GOP alternative to a comprehensive “fiscal cliff” compromise or “be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history.”

“I hope the president will get serious soon about providing, and working with us on, a balanced approach,” Boehner told reporters in a brief public appearance at which he took no questions.

The verbal hardball tactics came one day before the Republican-led House of Representative was to vote on the speaker’s “Plan B,” which would extend Bush-era tax cuts on income up to $1 million but would raise tax rates above that. His plan also keeps in place deep automatic defense and domestic spending cuts—the so-called sequester—that key Republicans have spent months denouncing as unacceptable and dangerous to national security.

“Tomorrow, the House will pass legislation to make permanent tax relief for nearly every American—99.81 percent of the American people,” Boehner said. “Then the president will have a decision to make: He can call on Senate Democrats to pass that bill or he can be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history.”

The speaker’s remarks hinted at the pitched public relations battle over the fiscal cliff—across-the-board income tax hikes and deep government spending cuts that will be triggered if the White House and congressional Republicans can’t reach a deal. The combination of spending cuts and tax hikes could plunge the fragile economy into a new recession. Both would go into effect Jan. 1 barring aneleventh-hour compromise.

Republicans have squirmed for months in the face of opinion polls showing the public sides with Obama, who has accused the GOP of holding tax cuts that chiefly benefit the middle class hostage to secure tax cuts for the richest Americans. The president first called for extending tax cuts on income up to $250,000 annually per household, then in a concession to Republicans raised that to $400,000.

Boehner’s gambit also highlighted how he is in a political bind. Many conservatives in the House oppose any tax increase at all. On Wednesday, the anti-tax Club for Growth interest group warned House members to vote against the speaker’s plan. And some House Republicans remain opposed to the automatic defense cuts they say risk endangering national security.

But it’s also not lost on anyone that Boehner’s “Plan B” could turn out to the be the legislative vehicle for any final compromise deal. Once received by the Senate, lawmakers there could amend the package and send it back to the House—though that may be easier said than done.

(Roll Call ace reporter Niels Lesniewski lays out the parliamentary details here with characteristic clarity and thoroughness, noting that “Plan B” might actually prove to be “a much-needed Christmas present” to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.)

In some ways, Obama seems to be playing along with the idea that the time for talking is over and its now time to vote. During a press conference at the White House shortly before Boehner’s comments, the president signaled that he was done negotiating. “Take the deal,” he said.

As for a negotiated compromise? “I think the speaker would like to get that done,” Obama said.

Republicans Float Plan to Make Electoral College More Unfair

By Jamelle Bouie

Since their across-the-board defeat in November, Republicans have talked a great game about reform and outreach, with presidential hopefuls Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and Bobby Jindal leading the charge. But the actual actions of the GOP belie this stated commitment to change. According to National Journal, for example, Republicans are planning a big push to change how states distribute their electoral votes. Currently, most states have a winner-take-all arrangement—if you win the majority of votes, you take all of the electoral votes.

For all but voters in deep red or dark blue states, this is unfair—the 48 percent of North Carolina voters who supported Barack Obama in this year’s election are all but irrelevant, since their votes play no part in the Electoral College distribution. Some reformers want to solve this problem with a national popular vote, others with nationwide proportional distribution of electoral votes.

Republicans, by contrast, want to “reform” the system by adopting the worst of all worlds—winner-take-all for Republican states, proportional distribution for Democratic ones:

Senior Republicans say they will try to leverage their party’s majorities in Democratic-leaning states in an effort to end the winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes. Instead, bills that will be introduced in several Democratic states would award electoral votes on a proportional basis.

How would this have affected the past election? National Journal offers Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin as examples:

Obama won all three states in 2008, handing him 46 electoral votes…Final election results show that Romney won nine of Michigan’s 14 districts, five of eight in Wisconsin, and at least 12 of 18 in Pennsylvania. Allocate the two statewide votes in each state to Obama and that means Romney would have emerged from those three Democratic states with 26 electoral votes, compared with just 19 for Obama (and one district where votes are still being counted).

This is a massive redistribution of electoral votes away from the top vote getter and toward the candidate whose support happens to center in rural areas. In essence, it’s taking the Electoral College—which is already malapportioned—and making it more so. Indeed, it amounts to little more than a scheme to rig presidential elections in favor of GOP candidates.

After all, if the current immigration and migration patterns hold, most population increases will happen in already dense regions. Democratic cities and suburbs will become bluer, as Republican exurbs and rural counties stay reliably red. Under the scheme described by National Journal, the large bulk of Pennsylvania’s population could vote reliably Democratic, but because they’re concentrated in a handful of counties, Republicans would consistently win the most electoral votes.

One Republican, quoted in the piece, acknowledges this fact: “If you did the calculation, you’d see a massive shift of electoral votes in states that are blue and fully [in] red control,” he adds, “There’s no kind of autopsy and outreach that can grab us those electoral votes that quickly.”

And therein lies the point of this call for “reform.” Barring an external shock to the system, the electorate in 2016 and 2020 will be more liberal than the one in 2012, a product of more Latino voters—who tend to hold more liberal views on government—and a rising cohort of young voters, who, likewise, are more liberal than their older counterparts. Which means that the odds for a sweeping rollback of the welfare state are low and dropping.

Republicans have two choices for what they can do. They can moderate their policies and craft a conservatism that accepts the reality of the welfare state, or they can find ways to stem the inevitable, and try to stack the game in their favor.

I’m not sure if this is a significant push, and if it is, I doubt it will be successful—if anything, it seems like a surefire way to mobilize Democratic involvement in state races, and push Republicans out of statehouses nationwide. But it does reveal the extent to which Republicans are thinking far less about reform than what they’ve said in public.

Sen. Patty Murray: Poor Getting ‘Lost In Shuffle’ During Fiscal Cliff Talks

With legislators focused on looming cuts to defense spending and entitlement programs, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told a gathering of progressives on Capitol Hill Tuesday that she is worried the most vulnerable groups depending on domestic programs may get “lost in the shuffle” during the deficit negotiations.

“It’s very concerning to me that so much of the focus in D.C. and across the country has been on the other half of sequestration — the defense cuts,” Murray said. “I feel very strongly that while we certainly need to cut spending responsibly and get our debt and deficit under control, we shouldn’t do that on the backs of the families and children who can afford it least.”

Democrats and Republicans need to hammer out a deficit-reduction deal before the New Year to avert the so-called fiscal cliff — the moment when the Bush tax cuts expire and drastic budget cuts hit defense and domestic spending. As Murray noted, those automatic cuts, known as sequestration, would include painful hits to programs that help needy families, such as child care funding, home heating assistance and job training for the unemployed.

Murray has said in recent months that Democrats may consider going “over” the fiscal cliff and letting the Bush tax cuts expire, thereby giving Republicans political cover not to renew the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Although she suggested it as a last resort, Murray, who was a co-chair of the supercommittee created by the Budget Control Act, reiterated the threat on Tuesday, saying Democrats should take the debate into 2013 rather than accept a deal that preserves tax breaks for the wealthy and doesn’t provide funding for domestic programs.

“I don’t want us to go over the fiscal cliff, slope, or mountain or whatever. That provides a lot of uncertainty for the country,” Murray said. “But taking an even worse deal simply for the sake of getting a deal would be deeply irresponsible, and it would hurt families far more than sequestration in the long run.”

As for actually going over the cliff, “it puts us in a place nobody wants to be,” Murray said. “But it puts the Republicans in a different place as well.”

Liberals have been vocal about their desire to keep Social Security and Medicare cuts out of the deficit talks, while conservatives have warned that significant defense cuts could hurt a fragile economy. Less attention has been paid to the kind of non-defense discretionary spending that Murray was talking about, such as Head Start educational funding for needy children, or how such programs might fare in a “grand bargain” struck between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

“These programs have been cut so much already,” Murray said. “They’re the one part of the budget that’s shrinking, not growing, and the families that depend on them have already sacrificed enough.”