Fiscal cliff: Even if Obama and Boehner make a deal, would Congress pass it?
For Boehner to be successful, DeGette said the speaker needs to remember during his negotiations with Obama that a sizeable number of Republicans are expected to jump ship on any tax agreement with the White House — whether it’s a short-term deal or something much bigger.
“The Republican leadership is going to have to realize they have to work with us,” she told POLITICO.
Boehner has needed Democrats before. In August 2011, 66 mostly conservative House Republicans voted against legislation to extend the debt limit, requiring GOP leaders to find dozens of Democratic yes votes on the bill that mandated about $1 trillion in spending cuts and also set in motion the sequestration ax poised to fall on the Pentagon and other federal agencies on Jan. 2.
Many of those same conservatives are again drawing a line for Boehner, this time with a demand that he make no concessions to the White House to raise tax rates.
“It’d be just so wonderful if I could not have to be the skunk at the party,” Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) told reporters Wednesday…
Even if House GOP conservatives sunk a bill on the first crack, former Rep. Vic Fazio (D-Calif.) said he thought Congress would be risking too much to reject a deal outright. “It’ll be like the TARP,” he said, referring to the House’s 2008 vote on financial bailout legislation sought by the outgoing George W. Bush administration. “They’ll come back and do it until we do it.”
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Boehner needs to go. Put the short term optics aside. The Republican leadership needs to be challeneged by conservatives and pushed from a leadership position. He cannot articualte anything more than “The American people blah blah blah….”
The country is spending itself into fiscal collapse and this bonehead cannot for the life of him articulate the most basic principals of fiscal sanity.
He’s useless.
By the way I think it is very telling that when handed the speakership he cried as if he had accomplished anything. You were tasked with representing your party in the house. Grow a pair and stop crying. This was never about you and your sense of false accomplishment.
Meat Fighter on December 10, 2012 at 2:48 PM
Spelunking being the favorite pastime among the Republicans in Washington D.C. I find this author’s worries to be unfounded.
LegendHasIt on December 10, 2012 at 2:48 PM
Good. I hope whatever deal they come up with (knowing that it won’t be anywhere close to what we actually need to stop racking up debt) fails miserably in both chambers. I’m so sick of hearing about the “fiscal cliff” when it isn’t at all a “cliff”. It’s a ditch, and not a very big ditch, when compared to the real spending reduction cliff that needs to come in order to come anywhere close to budget sanity. So, let’s go over this so-called “cliff”… it’s only a warmup to the real thing.
gravityman on December 10, 2012 at 3:00 PM
Go Huelskamp!
cptacek on December 10, 2012 at 3:08 PM
It certainly wouldn’t in the Senate; where Mitoch McConnell offered to allow a floor vote for President Obama’s existing plan and Harry Reid objected and wouldn’t allow it.
Mitoch55 on December 10, 2012 at 3:09 PM
The worthless load cried during the unveiling of Gerald Ford’s statue. However, when it comes to wielding the hammer on his own caucus he sure doesn’t hold back.
arnold ziffel on December 10, 2012 at 3:17 PM
Let them all go over the cliff, Obama and Boehner first, heads down. May they hit their stupid brains onto something very hard. To see them splattered, together, w/b the ultimate Schadenfreude.
Schadenfreude on December 10, 2012 at 3:21 PM