This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 2, 2012 - WASHINGTON – With the fiscal cliff looming at month’s end, politicians and officials who appeared on Sunday’s talk shows blustered back and forth in what U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill called “a game of chicken to put the painful stuff out there.”
By “painful stuff,” she meant the tax hikes and spending cuts in a deficit-reduction deal. House Speaker John Boehner complained that “we’re nowhere” on a deal; the chief White House negotiator, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, described such GOP positions as “political theater.”
But McCaskill, D-Mo., and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., agreed on NBC’s Meet the Press that Congress can come up with a deal this month if enough lawmakers are willing to compromise on what the Missouri senator called “painful” concessions from both Democrats and Republicans.
That may be the bottom line, but Boehner told Fox News that he was “flabbergasted” by the “nonserious” deficit plan that Geithner presented on Thursday, which calls for $1.6 trillion in tax increases (from expiring Bush tax cuts) for the wealthiest Americans and for Congress to give up some of it power to raise the debt ceiling.
“Right now, I would say we're nowhere -- period,” said Boehner, complaining that the last three weeks “have been wasted with this nonsense” from the White House. He added: “The president's idea of a negotiation is: ‘Roll over and do what I ask.’”
For his part, Geithner – who professed to remain optimistic about reaching a deal – told Fox that “the ball is really with” the Republicans. “They're in a hard place. And they're having a tough time trying to figure out what they can do, what they can get support from their members for.”
McCaskill said she felt “almost sorry for John Boehner. There is incredible pressure on him from a base of his party that is unreasonable about this. And he’s got to decide: Is his speakership more important, or is the country more important?”
But Corker said Boehner’s biggest problem isn’t so much his GOP base as “having a willing partner on the [Democratic} side that’s willing to look at these kinds of reforms.” He said Boehner is frustrated because “the White House keeps ‘spiking the ball’ on tax increases for the wealthy but is not yet forthcoming on real entitlement reform” – especially Medicare change.
While McCaskill said Democrats “have to be careful” on how to trim Medicare costs, she said “I think we can get to . . . more aggressive means-testing and higher co-pays for those people who can afford it.”
Two other senators – Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., and Mark Warner, D-Va. – made similar points from their parties' perspectives on CNN. Ayotte said she was “disappointed” in the initial White House proposal, but Warner described it as merely a first-round “term sheet” position.
“In any negotiation I've been involved in, you put down the term sheet; the other side comes back and says ‘No, I like this part. I don't like this part,’” Warner said.
Asked to name specific spending programs that Democrats would agree to cut under a deficit deal, McCaskill cited some farm subsidies, duplicative job-training programs and wasteful military spending. But Corker said, “Those are not the painful cuts that have to happen. We really have to look at much deeper reforms to the entitlements.”
Corker said both Boehner and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, “have both put revenues on the table,” mainly by reforming the tax system and closing loopholes – which he called “the pro-growth way of getting more revenues from wealthy Americans.”
Predicting that “cooler heads will prevail,” Corker said he thinks “we will resolve this” by month’s end. So does McCaskill, in part because of the potentially painful economic consequences of failure.
“This deal’s important enough; everybody ought to feel it’s worth going home over. At a certain point in time, we have to quit playing to the cheap seats and politics,” she said.
“And, frankly, that’s what we’re waiting on now. It’s a game of chicken to put the painful stuff out there.”
McCaskill says GOP is making Rice a scapegoat
In the same NBC appearance, McCaskill contended it was “terribly unfair” for some Republicans to denounce U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her comments in September about the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Noting that the “talking points” that guided Rice, “came from the intelligence community,” McCaskill complained that “you don’t hear one criticism of [former
McCaskill accused Senate Republicans of “a double standard” in attacking Rice – a possible nominee to replace outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – while many of them went easy on former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the Iraq war a few years ago.
“This is a strong, smart, capable, accomplished woman, and I think there are too many people over there that are looking for a scalp,” argued McCaskill.
While McCaskill avoided suggesting that the White House nominate Susan Rice, Corker – who will likely be the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the new Congress – promised a “fair hearing” if her name is put forward.
“I don’t think she is going to be nominated, but I’ve told people I certainly will give her a fair hearing,” Corker said.