Competing partisan proposals to avert potentially devastating budget cuts due to take effect Friday failed to advance in the Senate on Thursday as Congress prepared to leave Washington for the weekend without taking action to deal with the looming sequester.
The measures had been been expected to fail — they were largely intended to allow each party to demonstrate that their political opponents were resisting reasonable ideas that could lessen the impact of the $85 billion across-the-board cuts.
A Republican proposal would have left the budget cuts intact but provided new flexibility to President Obama to decide where the cuts would fall. It was rejected on a 38 to 62 vote — as all but two Democrats opposed it, along with nine Republicans who feared it would afford Obama too much power. Sixty votes were needed to advance the measure.
Likewise, a bill from Democrats that embodied Obama’s call to replace the across-the-board budget reduction with a mixture of other cuts and higher tax revenues was also blocked, on a 51 to 49 vote. Several Democrats facing 2014 elections voted against the measure.
With that, the Senate completed legislative action for the week. The House completed its final vote in the morning and has also left Washington, with lawmakers resigned that the budget cuts will take effect on schedule.
Bipartisan congressional leaders are scheduled to attend a meeting Friday at the White House with Obama, but there is little expectation the last minute face-to-face talk will result in a sequestration deal.
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters Thursday that he plans to tell Obama what he has said many times in public: House Republicans have twice passed bills to replace the cuts with what he calls more targeted reductions and that they should not have to adopt a third one before the Senate acts.
“Listen, we’ve laid our cards on the table,” he said.
Democrats say the House GOP bills were unacceptable because they merely shifted cuts in defense spending to domestic programs.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid said in a speech on the floor of the Senate on Thursday that it is still “not too late” to stop the cuts — provided Republicans agree with Obama’s call to include higher taxes as part of the solution.
Reid (D-Nev.) accused Republicans of being “completely inflexible” by refusing to countenance revenue increases, including cutting subsidies and closing tax loopholes, as part of a solution to avoid steep automatic spending cuts known the sequester.
In the Friday meeting, Obama is expected to push Republican congressional leaders to accept higher tax revenue to avoid the cuts, and the Republicans are expected to reply that they compromised at the beginning of the year when they agreed to more than $600 billion in new taxes, according to officials in both camps.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday that the meeting would address both the sequester and the nation’s broader fiscal challenges.
“The president believes we need to come together and deal with the sequester,” Carney said. “And the sequester is just, you know, one piece of the broader challenge here, which is reducing our deficit in a balanced way.”
Competing sequester bills fail in Senate
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Competing sequester bills fail in Senate
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