POSTED BY ORHAN
House Speaker John Boehner held his weekly press conference today and demanded Democrats outline their plan for spending cuts “to avert the fiscal cliff and help get the economy moving again”:
“…the president has warned about the dangers of going over the fiscal cliff, but his actions have not matched his public statements…despite claims that the president supports a ‘balanced’ approach, the Democrats have yet to get serious about real spending cuts…Listen, this is not a game…And this is a moment for adult leadership…the White House has to get serious…we’ve put real concessions on the line by putting revenues on the table right up front…Republicans have taken action to avert the fiscal cliff by passing legislation to stop all the tax hikes, to replace the sequester, and pave the way for tax reform and entitlement reform….But without spending cuts and entitlement reform, it’s going to be impossible to address our country’s debt crisis, and get our economy going again, and to create jobs.”
Now it may sound rather ironic to hear Boehner calling for “adult leadership”, yet he says that the Republicans did in fact make concessions; they put “revenues on the table right up front.” Why would the Democrats refuse to compromise?
The White House has a notion. According to the Administration, it’s because even though they say they put revenues on the table, the Republican leadership won’t agree to raise tax rates on the top 2 percent. And the fact that the American people elected Obama on a platform that states the rich should pay more appears to be simply irrelevant to Boehner.
Parsing the rest of what Boehner is calling for–stopping tax hikes, paving the way for tax reform and entitlement reform–is just the same old Republican dogma, tax cuts and social spending cuts. And the bill to “replace the sequester” (designed by Paul Ryan and passed in the House with zero support from Democrats) replaced fiscal cliff Defense cuts with cuts to the Food Stamp program.
So Speaker Boehner is making clear the Republicans intent to change not one iota; they intend to dig in and hold fast to their program of serving the rich and the rest of the people be damned, even if we made clear our intent through the electoral process. So much for democracy.