No one could say late Thursday what will happen next. Just 11 days remain until the new year, when more than $500 billion in automatic tax increases and spending cuts will begin to take effect, threatening to undermine the sluggish recovery and prompt a new recession.
As a grim-faced Boehner hurried from the Capitol on Thursday evening, his office issued a statement abdicating responsibility for solving the crisis to Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass. Now it is up to the president to work with Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff,” the statement said, referring to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).
White House press secretary Jay Carney vowed that Obama would act but offered no clear path through the political mine field. The House is now out of session until after Christmas. The Senate is scheduled to meet for only a few hours on Friday afternoon before members leave town until next Thursday.
“The president’s main priority is to ensure that taxes don’t go up on 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small businesses in just a few short days,” Carney said in a written statement. “The President will work with Congress to get this done and we are hopeful that we will be able to find a bipartisan solution quickly that protects the middle class and our economy.”
Senior Democrats, meanwhile, urged Boehner to stop wooing his hard-liners and resume negotiations with the White House over a debt-reduction compromise that could win the support of Democrats and Republicans.
“Speaker Boehner’s partisan approach wasted an entire week and pushed middle-class families closer to the edge,” Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson said in a statement. “The only way to avoid the cliff altogether is for Speaker Boehner to return to negotiations, and work with President Obama and the Senate to forge a bipartisan deal.”
Even if the resumption of talks were to yield a breakthrough, Boehner’s ability to deliver GOP votes for any proposal that raises taxes is now in doubt after he was unable to rally House Republicans behind what he had dubbed “Plan B.”
Emboldened liberals quickly argued that Democrats should demand additional concessions from Republicans, either upping the demand for fresh tax revenue or withdrawing Obama’s offer to seek savings through cuts in federal health and retirement programs.
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