Adele M Stan: Senate Leaders Work Through Weekend

to Avoid Fiscal Spending Cuts. After a White House meeting with congressional leaders of both parties, President Barack Obama appeared in the White House press room to urge lawmakers to vote on a package that would avert the automatic across the board spending cuts and tax hikes that are scheduled to go into effect on New Year's Day, if the Congress fails to act by December 31. The cuts and hikes law, known as the sequester, and dubbed the "Fiscal Cliff" by Federal Chairman Ben Bernacke, were passed into law last year under Republican pressure, in return for a lifting of the debt ceiling that allows the government to borrow enough money to meet its obligations. Emerging from this meeting, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, announced their plan to work through Saturday to arrive at a deal, that the Senate could take up on Sunday, December 30. Any bill passed by the Senate would then have to see a vote in the House, which has already passed two bills on spending and revenue measures that are unacceptable to Democrats and to the president. While the president wants to raise income taxes on households earning more than $250,000 per year, the bill passed by the House in August would maintain the Bush era tax cuts on all Americans, including the wealthiest. The House also passed a package of spending cuts, intended to replace the sequester cuts, including repealing sections of Obama-care, including the funding of state based exchanges for the purchase of affordable individual health insurance policies. Other cuts target Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program, all of them unacceptable to the White House. The bill, HR 6684, which passed the Republican led House on December 19, is clearly an ideological statement, and not a piece of legislation that would stand a chance of passage in the Democratic held Senate. Yet, because the House passed these bills, Speaker John Boehner is insisting the Senate take up the job of hammering out a workable deal. The House is also slated to vote on Sunday on any bill that Reid may bring to the Senate floor. Appearing in the White House press room on Friday afternoon, President Barack Obama demanded that congressional leaders bring a proposal, regardless of its prospects for passage, to the Senate floor for an up or down vote.