Obama & Democrats Not Offering Spending Reductions | House Republican Leaders Send Obama New Offer

Update 4:30 PM: In record time, the White House responded on behalf of  President Obama and rejected the House Republicans' new offer.  Imagine WH staffers are now speaking for POTUS in responding to the Leaders of The House of Representative which represent the people of the United States.  President Obama was elected with less than 1 % over his opponent last month.  But 1% appears good enough for Obama and his White House staff to tell the representatives of the people to "kiss off."  Where was the 'supreme leader" today that he could not think consider the offer ?   Well folks, Obama is not yet following in the footsteps of his dictator friends and has not yet started rounding up the American people so I guess he gets a pass today  on ignoring the Representatives of the people.  The ending of Obama's 1st Term and the beginning his second term is headed to the history books as "epic failure."
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Today in Washington, D.C. - Dec 3, 2012
The Senate will reconvene at 2 PM today resume consideration of S. 3254, the fiscal year 2013 Defense authorization bill.

At 5 PM, the Senate will take up the nomination of Paul William Grimm to be U.S. District Judge for the District of Maryland.  With little debate, att 5:30, the Senate will vote on confirmation of the Grimm nomination and then on cloture on the Defense authorization bill (i.e. to cut off debate).

WARNING: Tomorrow, the Senate is expected to resume consideration of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Treaty #112-7, with a vote on ratification of the treaty scheduled for noon.  This is another UN treaty that should NOT be passed!

The House reconvened today at Noon.  About 4 PM, the House will take up  H.R. 5817, Eliminate Privacy Notice Confusion Act - Amending the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to provide an exception to the annual privacy notice requirement.

Today, the House GOP Leaders sent a letter to President Obama making a new offer to avert the fiscal cliff.   The offer is centered around a middle ground approach first presented to Congress last year by President Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, Erskine Bowles. The Bowles plan, presented in 2011 to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, is consistent with the framework House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) proposed the day after the election: a balanced approach of significant spending cuts and new revenues from tax reform with fewer loopholes and lower tax rates.  This is another attempt to jumpstart substantive, good faith negotiations toward a bipartisan solution that can be enacted soon, a stark contrast to the unserious proposal the White House put forward last week.

The letter to President Obama was signed by Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Republican Conference Chairman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI), Budget Committee Chairman Paurel="nofollow" target="new">l Ryan (R-WI), and Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI).

However, news reports today note that in fiscal cliff negotiations President Obama is “sticking to the liberal line and frustrating Republicans on the other side of the bargaining table,” “offering nothing new to rein in spending and overhaul entitlement programs,” and that his unserious offer last week “is attracting praise from the left for his opening bid” for “presenting an early offer that asks for nearly everything that Democrats want, while refusing to outline any specific cuts or entitlement reforms,” observers are starting to see overreach on the part of Democrats and the White House.

On Friday, CNN’s David Gergen wrote, “[T]his week, there is a palpable sense in Washington that the parties are drifting apart and chances of an agreement before Christmas are diminishing. . . . Why has a grand bargain become so much harder than it should be? . . . [F]rankly, it is the president and the Democrats who are over-playing their hands now.” He added, “The proposal that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner put before Republicans on Thursday  . .  was clearly intended to score political points with Democrats rather than entice Republicans into serious negotiations. It was full of nonstarters.”

Gergen explained, “What we are seeing, I regret to say, looks very much like a movie we have seen before: The side that wins an election thinks the public has given them permission to steamroll the other side, pushing through their favorite ideas willy-nilly. . . . We saw that back in the early '90s, when first the Clinton White House overreached, going too far left . . . .” He warned that Democrats are in danger of “becoming so combative and rigid that good faith negotiations become almost impossible.”

In a column titled, “Who’s not bargaining in good faith?” The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson says “Now it is time for President Obama and congressional Democrats to [abandon their untenable position]. As long as they don’t, they aren’t bargaining in good faith, or in the national interest.” Indeed, he points out, “That we have arrived at this juncture indicts our democratic system and many Democratic politicians, who have obstructed constructive change in retiree programs. Obama continues this short-sighted tradition.” After explaining the unsustainable costs of entitlement programs, Samuelson concludes, “Spending must be addressed. . . . By evading this, Obama flirts with failure.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in the Weekly Republican Address: “The President has said he wants a so-called balanced approach to solve this crisis. But what he proposed this week was a classic bait and switch on the American people—a tax increase double the size of what he campaigned on, billions of dollars in new stimulus spending and an unlimited, unchecked authority to borrow from the Chinese. Maybe I missed it but I don’t recall him asking for any of that during the presidential campaign.  These ideas are so radical that they have already been rejected on a bipartisan basis by Congress.

“Fresh off his reelection, the President has an obligation to first steer us away from the fiscal cliff, and second, to tackle our $16-plus trillion debt, that is driven by our runaway entitlement programs, so our country doesn’t reach this dangerous crossroads ever again.

“But we’ve seen an utter lack of leadership from President Obama, and his allies on the left have shown little—very little—to no willingness to tackle real, structural entitlement reform. There is no manner of tax hike that can save Medicare or Medicaid—these programs can only be fixed with real reforms that go to the heart of how they work. . . . The longer the White House waits to get serious is a day closer to going over the fiscal cliff, and the harder it will be to find a solution.”

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