Obama, top lawmakers to meet Friday on budget cuts

WASHINGTON (AP) — 2.27.13 — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama will meet Fri­day with the top lead­ers in the House and Sen­ate, sev­eral hours past the dead­line for avert­ing auto­matic bud­get cuts, to dis­cuss how to pro­ceed on divi­sive tax-and-spend issues.

Because the meet­ing is set to take place well after Friday’s dead­line for the so-called sequester to kick in, it appears both sides are oper­at­ing under an assump­tion that a deal to avert the cuts ahead of the dead­line is now out of the question.

Sen­ate Repub­li­can leader Mitch McConnell said the ses­sion will focus on ways to reduce gov­ern­ment spend­ing, but he also said he will not back down on his oppo­si­tion to any new rev­enues. McConnell, along with House Speaker John Boehner, Sen­ate Demo­c­ra­tic leader Harry Reid and House Demo­c­ra­tic leader Nancy Pelosi, will attend meet­ing at the White House.

“We can either secure those reduc­tions more intel­li­gently, or we can do it the president’s way with across-the board cuts. But one thing Amer­i­cans sim­ply will not accept is another tax increase to replace spend­ing reduc­tions we already agreed to,” said McConnell, R-Ky.

The meet­ing reflects a move to jump­start nego­ti­a­tions after weeks of inac­tion on cuts that both par­ties have said could inflict major dam­age to gov­ern­ment pro­grams, the mil­i­tary and the econ­omy at large. No seri­ous talks to avert the cuts have been under way, and Friday’s meet­ing will be the first face-to-face dis­cus­sion between Obama and Repub­li­can lead­ers this year.

The White House has warned that the $85 bil­lion in cuts could affect every­thing from com­mer­cial flights to class­rooms and meat inspec­tions. The cuts would slash domes­tic and defense spend­ing, lead­ing to forced unpaid days off for hun­dreds of thou­sands of gov­ern­ment workers.

The impact won’t be imme­di­ate. Fed­eral work­ers would be noti­fied next week that they will have to take up to a day every week off with­out pay, but the fur­loughs won’t start for a month due to noti­fi­ca­tion require­ments. That will give nego­tia­tors some breath­ing room to keep work­ing on a deal.

On Thurs­day, the Sen­ate is expected to stage votes on com­pet­ing Demo­c­ra­tic and GOP plans to deal with the auto­matic cuts, known as a sequester in Washington-speak. But Democ­rats were poised to vote down a GOP plan to give Obama flex­i­bil­ity to redi­rect money from lower pri­or­ity accounts to top pri­or­i­ties such as air traf­fic con­trol, fed­eral law enforce­ment and mil­i­tary readiness.

Repub­li­cans, in turn were set to kill by fil­i­buster a Demo­c­ra­tic mea­sure that would fore­stall the auto­matic cuts through the end of the year, replac­ing them with longer-term cuts to the Pen­ta­gon and cash pay­ments to farm­ers and installing a min­i­mum 30 per­cent tax rate on income exceed­ing $1 million.

The GOP alter­na­tive mea­sure has yet to be released but Repub­li­cans were cir­cu­lat­ing a mea­sure that would give Obama author­ity to pro­pose a rewrite to the 2013 bud­get to redis­trib­ute the cuts. Obama would be unable to cut defense by more than the $43 bil­lion reduc­tion that the Pen­ta­gon cur­rently faces, and would also be unable to raise taxes to undo the cuts. The GOP plan would allow the Obama pro­posal to go into effect unless Con­gress passed a res­o­lu­tion to over­turn them.

The idea is that money could be trans­ferred from lower-priority accounts to accounts fund­ing air traf­fic con­trol or meat inspec­tion. But the White House says that such moves would only offer slight relief. At the same time, how­ever, it could take pres­sure off of Con­gress to address the sequester.

Sen­ate Democ­rats have pre­pared a mea­sure that would fore­stall the auto­matic cuts through the end of the year, replac­ing them with longer-term cuts to the Pen­ta­gon and cash pay­ments to farm­ers, and by installing a min­i­mum 30 per­cent tax rate on income exceed­ing $1 mil­lion. That plan is vir­tu­ally cer­tain to be top­pled by a GOP-led fil­i­buster vote later this week.

In the House, where Repub­li­cans in the last Con­gress passed leg­is­la­tion to replace the cuts, Boehner has said it’s now up to Obama and the Sen­ate to fig­ure a way out. The Sen­ate never took up the House-passed bill.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Feb 27 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.