Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appealed directly to Vice President Biden Sunday to try to break an impasse in negotiations for a last-ditch deal to avoid the “fiscal cliff” Sunday, as Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid stepped back from talks.
McConnell came to the Senate floor and announced he’d reached out directly to the White House for help shortly after Democratic aides said negotiations between McConnell (R-Ky.) and Reid (D-Nev.) had suffered a “major setback.”
Democrats said Republicans had demanded significant cuts to Social Security benefits in exchange for President Obama’s request to extend emergency unemployment benefits and cancel deep cuts to the Pentagon and other agency budgets. Reid was “shocked and disappointed” by the new GOP demand, said a Democratic aide close to the talks, who described the request as a “poison pill.”
Reid said he was now stepping back from the talks to allow McConnell and Biden to work.
In his floor remarks, McConnell said he had delivered his latest offer to Democrats shortly after 7 p.m. on Saturday but had not yet received a response. Now, he said, he was appealing directly to Biden.
Biden has not been deeply involved in the talks to this point, but McConnell and Biden have a long history of crafting key legislative deals.
“I was here all day yesterday,” McConnell said. “There’s no single issue that remains an impossible sticking point. The sticking point appears to be the willingness and interest or frankly the courage to close the deal. I want everyone to know, I’m willing to get this done, but I need a dance partner.”
Reid responded moments later by saying he had spoken to President Obama several times Sunday morning and was not in a position at this time to provide a counter-offer.
“The Republican leader has told me, and he’s just said that he’s working with the vice president,” Reid said. “And he and the vice president, I wish them well. In the meantime, I will try to come up with something, but at this stage I don’t have a counter-offer to make. Perhaps as the day wears on, I will be able to. But I think the Republican leader has shown absolutely good faith.”
The abrupt developments in negotiations came after a brief interlude of unusual optimism.
The Democratic aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations, said Democrats had shown flexibility over the weekend on the major sticking points involving taxes. They had not ruled out maintaining the tax on inherited estates at the current low rate, as Republicans prefer. And they had been open to a deal that would allow taxes to rise on many fewer wealthy households than Obama had proposed. Republicans were seeking tax increases only on income higher than $400,000 or $500,000 a year, while Obama wanted to set the threshold at $250,000 a year.
But Obama was pressing for $30 billion in new spending to keep unemployment benefits flowing to the long-term unemployed, and he wanted to postpone roughly $100 billion in automatic spending cuts set to hit agency budgets next months. In exchange for those items, McConnell insisted Sunday that Democrats put cuts to Social Security benefits on the table, noting that Obama had offered to do so as part of the big deficit-reduction package he had been negotiating earlier this month with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio.).
Senate negotiators search for deal to avoid the ‘fiscal cliff’
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Senate negotiators search for deal to avoid the ‘fiscal cliff’
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