Lawmakers laid out their stances on coming negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff yesterday, when the Senate Republican leader called for stopping across-the-board defense cuts from starting in January.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) kicked off the lame-duck session of Congress yesterday by describing disparate ways to address the so-called fiscal cliff of year-end thorny budget events. That cliff includes $500 billion in decade-long “sequestration” cuts to planned defense spending.
Reid, McConnell, and House leaders are scheduled to meet Friday with President Barack Obama at the White House for a summit of sorts on the fiscal cliff–which also includes the scheduled expiration of Bush-era tax cuts. President Barack Obama and Democrats want the cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire, something Republicans have vehemently opposed.
McConnell cited the politically unpopular defense sequestration cuts multiple times on the Senate floor yesterday. He said he wants to “keep everybody’s tax rates right where they are for now, figure out a way to avoid the automatic defense cuts scheduled to hit at the end of the year without cutting a penny less than we promised, and (commit) to the kind of comprehensive tax and entitlement reform next year that we all claim to want.”
The Republican leader said there’s “no question” Congress can “replace the defense portion of the so-called sequester with cuts of equal size in areas that both sides already agreed to during last summer’s debt limit negotiations.”
Reid, for his part, did not single out the defense sequestration cuts during his comments yesterday at the start of the post-election lame-duck session, which could run until the end of the year.
The Senate Democratic leader reiterated his call for Congress to “forge an agreement that will ask the richest of the rich–the most fortunate among us–to pay a little extra to reduce the deficit and secure our economic future.”
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said last week that he doesn’t foresee a full-blown sequester-replacement plan emerging during the lame-duck session. Boehner, though, gave Democrats hope when he said last Wednesday, the day after the election, that House Republicans are willing to accept some additional revenues in a new deficit plan. The House GOP leader supports revenues through tax reforms such as closing loopholes, not through raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.