Obama, GOP leaders lay down markers on budget deal
WASHINGTON (AP) — Taking little time to celebrate, President Barack Obama is setting out to leverage his re-election into legislative success in an upcoming showdown with congressional Republicans over taxes, deficits and the impending “fiscal cliff.” House Speaker John Boehner says Republicans are willing to consider some form of higher tax revenue as part of the solution — but only “under the right conditions.”
All sides are setting out opening arguments for the negotiations to come.
Even before returning to Washington from his hometown of Chicago, Obama was on the phone Wednesday with the four top leaders of the House and Senate, including Boehner, to talk about the lame-duck Congress that convenes just one week after Election Day.
Obama adviser David Axelrod warned Republican leaders to take lessons from Tuesday’s vote. The president won after pledging to raise taxes on American households earning more than $250,000 a year “and was re-elected in a significant way,” Axelrod told MSNBC Thursday morning.
“Hopefully people will read those results and read them as a vote for cooperation and will come to the table,” Axelrod said. “And obviously everyone’s going to have to come with an open mind to these discussions. But if the attitude is that nothing happened on Tuesday, that would be unfortunate.”
He noted that conservative Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock in Indiana dismissed the value of compromise and instead said Democrats should join the GOP. “And I note that he’s not on his way to the United States Senate,” Axelrod said. Mourdock lost to Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly.
Without a budget deal to head off the fiscal showdown, the nation faces a combination of expiring Bush-era tax cuts and steep across-the-board spending cuts that could total $800 billion next year. Economists have warned that could tip the nation back into recession.
Vice President Joe Biden, flying to his home in Delaware from Chicago, told reporters aboard Air Force Two that the White House was “really anxious” to get moving on the problem. He said he’d been making a lot of calls and “people know we’ve got to get down to work and I think they’re ready to move.” He didn’t identify whom he had spoken with but predicted the “fever will break” on past legislative gridlock after some soul-searching by Republicans.
The White House held out this week’s election results as a mandate from voters for greater cooperation between the White House and Congress. At the same time, it reiterated Obama’s top priorities: cutting taxes for middle-class families and small businesses, creating jobs and cutting the deficit “in a balanced way” — through a combination of tax increases on wealthier Americans and spending cuts.
