Lawmakers Trade Blame as Congressional Deficit Talks Crumble - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Barring an unexpected turnaround before Monday’s deadline, the failure of the special Congressional deficit committee will be the third high-profile effort to fall short of a deal in the last 12 months, including a bipartisan deficit commission and talks last summer between President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner.
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By law, the special Congressional committee’s inability to reach an agreement will trigger $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over 10 years to the military and domestic programs, to start in 2013.
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the leaders of the committee planned to issue a statement on Monday acknowledging that they had failed to reach an agreement. And lawmakers on the panel, which is evenly divided between the two parties, blamed one another for the failure.
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Democrats blamed the Republicans for their unwillingness to yield on a no-new-taxes pact they signed at the request of a conservative antitax group, arguing that the American public realizes that no grand deal could be reached without a combination of spending cuts and new tax revenue.
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ut Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, the co-chairman, said it was the Democrats’ inflexibility that had caused the impasse, particularly when it came to agreeing to major money-saving changes in social programs like Medicare and Social Security.