WASHINGTON — Speaker John Boehner on Tuesday said the U.S. House won’t act to replace automatic federal spending cuts until the Senate “gets off their ass” and passes a plan.
Boehner also accused President Barack Obama of using the military as a “prop” to campaign fora tax increase in the debate over across-the-board spending reductions that will take effect starting Friday.
“If the Senate acts, I’m sure the House will act quickly,” Boehner told reporters in Washington. Boehner said Obama isn’t “focused” on finding a solution to averting the reductions.
Boehner dueled remotely with Obama and Senate Democrats over the automatic reductions, with the president using the backdrop of a Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. shipyard in Newport News,Va., to emphasize the potential effects of defense industry cuts in the backyards of Republican lawmakers.
Across-the-board cuts known as sequestration would shrink federal spending by $85 billion for the budget year through Sept. 30 and total $1.2 trillion over nine years. With the deadline approaching, there was no public sign that either side is negotiating to avoid the start of the cuts.
Half of the reductions will affect defense spending, and the rest will be spread over other federal agencies. Obama and Democrats want to replace part of the cuts with higher tax revenue, while Republicans oppose more taxes.
“These cuts are wrong,” Obama told workers at the shipyard. “They’re not smart.They’re not fair. They’re a self-inflicted wound that doesn’t have to happen.”
Unless there’s a resolution in coming weeks, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that budget reductions will cause a 0.6 percentage-point reduction in economic growth this year. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday that “this additional nearterm burden on the recovery is significant.”
Boehner said the House has done its job and now Obama and the Democratic majority in the Senate should act.
“We have moved a bill in the House twice; we should not have to move a third bill before the Senate gets off their ass and begins to do something,” Boehner said.
The House passed its proposal to avert the spending cuts last year, and the measure expired when the last session of Congress ended in early January.
Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid said voters should understand which chamber is “sitting on its posterior.” He said it’s the House that is on the sidelines while the Senate is working to pass a bill. Senate Democrats propose replacing this year’s portion of the reductions with a smaller defense spending cut, a halt in direct payments to farmers, and a tax increase that would impose a minimum 30 percent rate on top earners.
The tax provision is known as the Buffett rule after one of its leading proponents, billionaire Warren Buffett. AdamJentleson, Reid’s spokesman, said after Congressional Budget Office analysis of the tax that Democrats will raise the income threshold for the tax to $5 million annually. The original proposal fully phased in the tax at $2 million a year.
Votes probably will be held Thursday, Jentleson said.
Senate Republicans may offer an alternative that would give the president flexibility to cut the required amount of spending at federal agencies.
Obama and Reid have dismissed that plan because it includes no revenue and the cuts required are still too steep. Several Republicans, including Sen. John McCain of Arizona, have raised objections to giving the president such authority.
Obama on Tuesday told the shipyard workers that he doesn’t want responsibility for apportioning the looming “sequester” cuts because there is no wise way to do it.
“The problem is, when you’re cutting $85 billion in seven months,” Obama said, “there’s no smart way to do that. You don’t want to have to choose between, ‘Let’s see, do I close funding for the disabled kid, or the poor kid? Do I close this Navy shipyard or some other?’”
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader in the chamber, said Tuesday that his caucus is still discussing several possible alternatives and that he may seek a vote on more than one Republican proposal.
Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said his party is sticking to its demand for more tax revenue as part of a deal to replace the spending reductions.
Boehner, at a speech Tuesday afternoon in Washington, said he backed the idea of revamping and simplifying the tax code, without backing off his insistence that it not raise revenue.
“I hope that we are on the verge of moving a tax-reform bill that will lower rates for all” and “clean out the loopholesand some of the nonsense that’s there” in the Internal Revenue code, Boehner said.
Some House Republicans said the fiscal gap is not too wide to negotiate more targeted spending cuts to avoid the across-the-board reductions.
Obama “can sit down with us and negotiate a redistribution of the cuts,” Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, said in an interview. “But the cuts are going to occur” in one form or another, he said.
“There is a range of options where we would negotiate with the president where he would get some of the things he wants, but he is not going to get revenue, it is just not going to happen,” Cole said.
Republican Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia, whose district includes the Naval Station Norfolk and has the highest concentration of military personnel in the nation, said he disagrees with his party’s leadership on raising revenue.
Rigell, who accompanied Obama on the flight to the shipyard from Washington, said he’d support curtailing some breaks in the tax code to get more money into the Treasury.
Before Air Force One departed, Rigell said he planned to use the travel time to urge the president to offer a “specific alternative” to the automatic cuts rather than his general call for a package that mixes new revenue with spending cuts.
Also on Tuesday came word of the first tangible impact of the looming budget cuts on the nation’s security at home. To save costs, the Department of Homeland Security has started releasing illegal aliens being held in immigration jails across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.
Meanwhile, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday that the defense budget cuts scheduled to begin at the end of the week will have a swift and severe impact on military readiness and that Congress needs to take fast action to stop them.
Information for this article was contributed by Heidi Przybyla, Richard Rubin, Kathleen Hunter, Peter Cook and Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News; by Christi Parsons of the Tribune Washington Bureau; and by Josh Lederman, Andrew Taylor, Nedra Pickler and Richard Lardner of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/27/2013