Lid on ‘fiscal-cliff’ talks seen as vital to success

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is joined Friday by (from left) House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid after a “fiscal-cliff” meeting with President Barack Obama.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is joined Friday by (from left) House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid after a “fiscal-cliff” meeting with President Barack Obama.

— President Barack Obama and congressional leaders sat down together Friday for the first time after a long political campaign and began negotiations on a budget deal. To reach an agreement, the negotiators should keep mum on the details of their talks and avoid giving a blow-by-blow of any progress being made to the media, lawmakers and political experts said.

“It’s not smart to negotiate on television, on the radio or in the newspaper,” said U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin, a Republican from Little Rock.

The negotiations are an attempt to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” a combination of automatic spending cuts and tax increases that are scheduled to go into effect at year’s end.

Members of both parties believe that the tax increases and the spending cuts, which would hit social programs and the military, would send the country into another recession.

Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Obama, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should sit face to face without the glare of the media. He said the “sausage making” of crafting legislation would be better kept private.

“The president should call Speaker Boehner and Leader Reid into his office. No cameras. No announcements. No press advisories,” Steele said. “They should go into a room and bash this thing out. The American people don’t want to see how you make the sausage. They just want it to be good.”

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush met with congressional leaders of both parties in relative privacy at Andrews Air Force Base. They emerged with a deal to raise taxes and cut spending.

Mark Schmitt, a senior fellow with the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal research and advocacy group, said he’s in no hurry to see a deal done before January because, in part, he’d like to see the tax cuts expire.

He said pressure on leaders to engage in the “external conversations” taking place among various constituencies make it unlikely they will try to block out the media and retreat to a place like Andrews Air Force Base.

“It’s really not possible now,” he said.

Obama campaigned on letting the tax cuts expire for couples who make more than $250,000 a year. Republicans have been adamantly opposed to raising tax rates, but have signaled a willingness to raise tax revenue in other ways, as long as significant spending cuts are included.

If the George W. Bush-era tax rates expire at the end of the year, tax rates will climb back to Clinton-era levels.

Rather than weigh in on specifics, and potentially get boxed in by staking out a position early in the process, some members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation expressed a desire to give the high-level talks a chance to succeed.

For instance, Griffin said he’d be willing to raise revenue by ending some tax deductions and exemptions as long as the Bush-era tax cuts remain. But he didn’t say which deductions he’d do away with and said he was “open to hearing various proposals.”

Similarly, U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, a Republican from Rogers, said he was “not going to comment on hypotheticals” when asked whether he would support a tax-rate increase.

“If it is the right plan for our country,” he said, “it shouldn’t be all that difficult to sell it to members of Congress and the American public.”

U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, a Jonesboro Republican, declined to take a position on tax rates and said the negotiations are “just beginning.” He said that as the talks continue, he will push for “absolute spending controls.”

And Arkansas’ U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, said increasing revenue has to be part of any successful deal. But when asked whether Pryor would support a rate increase, his spokesman Michael Teague replied: “We don’t know what reform will look like yet.”

Arkansas’ U.S. Sen. John Boozman, a Republican, said he would vote against any deal that included an increased tax rate.

Republican Tom Cotton, who will succeed Arkansas’ Democratic U.S. Rep. Mike Ross in January, said Arkansans didn’t elect him to raise taxes. He said it is likely that a comprehensive tax overhaul will be undertaken during the next Congress.

Although he said there is “a place” for private deliberations, Cotton warned that any broad deal needed to go through an open process that would include extensive committee hearings, so the public could keep track.

“Secret backdoor dealings don’t lead to good policy outcomes,” he said.

As an example, he cited an unsuccessful attempt in 2007 by Arizona’s Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain and Sen. Ted Kennedy, the late Massachusetts Democrat, to write comprehensive immigration legislation.

“It was presented to the public fully baked, and the American people recoiled from it,” he said.

As negotiations continue, progress will likely be made if the two sides keep the details of their talks private, said Randall Calvert, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

That was the central rule at the country’s first and perhaps most crucial negotiation, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.

“The first thing they decided was ‘nobody’s talking,’” Calvert said.

Founding Father George Mason called the rule a “necessary precaution to prevent misrepresentations or mistakes; there being a material difference between the appearance of a subject in its first crude and undigested shape, and after it shall have been properly matured and arranged.”

When participants talk to the media during negotiations, Calvert said, it’s usually an effort to paint the other side in a negative light.

“The central conundrum in these kinds of problems is who is going to get blamed if things don’t work out,” he said.

During talks Friday with Obama at the White House, congressional leaders seemed intent on keeping the details of the negotiations private. Before hustling back in to resume talks, they highlighted their common ground in vague, brief comments.

“We feel we understand what the problem is,” Reid said. “We all feel very comfortable with each other.”

“It was a constructive meeting,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican. “We all understand where we are.”

Calvert said he’ll be watching to see if their tone changes after subsequent meetings. He said it will be noteworthy if they maintain their reticence to provide details.

“That may be an indicator that they’ve gotten serious,” he said.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/18/2012

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