Posted on 01/01/2013 4:06:45 PM PST by bimboeruption
House Republican leaders will assess support within their conference for two options on the Senate's "fiscal cliff" compromise before deciding whether to try to amend the legislation and send it back to the upper chamber, lawmakers and aides said.
The two choices: amend the bill with spending cuts - likely killing it for the 112th Congress - or voting to adopt the Senate measure and sending it to President Obama for his signature.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told his conference he was flatly opposed to the Senate bill without more spending cuts, members said as they emerged from a nearly two-hour Republican meeting in the Capitol Tuesday afternoon.
According to sources in the room, Cantor said that he did not "support" the Senate-backed bill but stopped short of saying he would vote against it if the House took it up on the floor.
The sizeable objections among House Republicans to the Senate approach risked scuttling the deal worked out by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Vice President Biden on Monday. That deal passed early Tuesday in the Senate 89-8.
During an eventing vote series, members are being whipped on various amendment options. If there is more than a 217-vote majority within the Republican conference for the amended bill, it will be brought to the floor. If a majority cannot be found, the Senate deal will get an up-or-down vote, members said Tuesday evening.
"I am looking forward to getting some spending cuts in this deal," Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said.
Members said that one option would replace a year of sequestration cuts with cuts to mandatory programs approved by the House in the spring. Those cuts were decried by Democrats as slashing entitlement spending.
Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-Ohio) said the GOP amendment would cut $328 billion and mirrors the defense sequester measure that has already passed the House.
LaTourette predicted that a vote on the Senate bill would not attract a majority of the majority. He said it would probably get 150 Democratic votes and the support of only 70 Republicans.
"We are asking members about what options they want and then we will know how to move forward," incoming Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said. He said final votes could come later in the evening.
The developments followed signs earlier Tuesday that the Senate’s New Year’s Eve compromise on the "fiscal cliff" had hit major turbulence in the House.
Robert Byrd types, yes, that’s just the point. He was like 100 when he left politics, and not representative of the party since the civil rights movement and the New Left. Check out what happened to the Southern vote between ‘65 and now. They are hardly the same parties.
Every year the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner press releases bring out the sarcastic jerk in me, as I know damned well that they'd actually be aghast at being connected with the freakshow that makes up today's Democrat Party... and vice-versa. Having said that, I suspect they'd both be envious of the capability of the current "machine."
Mr. niteowl77
They’ll say things like that, because, hey, Jeffersonians became Jacksonians, and both were fir agrarians and against Yankee mercantilists, and so on. But it’s false history. Jacksonian democracy was not Jeffersonian. Read “The Era of Good Feelings” by George Dangerfield, for reference. Jackson is the real foundation of the Democrat Party.
Republicans might as well claim Whigism as its true foundation, and that would be more ideologically accurate. But they don’t, and just as well. Because Republicans weren’t Whigs even if Lincoln was a Whig before he was a Republican, for instance. There are reasons the former party failed and the latter dominated Washington from Lincoln to Wilson.
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