Boehner: Up to Democrats to prevent budget cuts

ANDREW TAYLOR

JULIE PACE

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — House Speaker John Boehner said Wednes­day it’s unlikely the Republican-controlled House and Democratic-led Sen­ate will pre­vent a wave of auto­matic spend­ing cuts from begin­ning to strike the econ­omy in two weeks. Yet he sounded hope­ful about avoid­ing a par­tial shut­down of the gov­ern­ment when a tem­po­rary spend­ing bill expires next month.

Clois­tered in his Capi­tol office over­look­ing the National Mall, Boehner said in an inter­view with The Asso­ci­ated Press that he was skep­ti­cal of many of Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s plans, laid out the night before in the annual State of the Union address.

Boehner voiced doubts about Obama’s pro­posal for taxpayer-funded help for pre-school edu­ca­tion for all 4-year-olds, and would not com­mit to pass­ing a path­way to cit­i­zen­ship for the nation’s 11 mil­lion ille­gal immi­grants, though doing so would be “some­what help­ful” to mem­bers of his party as they seek to regain sup­port among His­pan­ics. “There’s no magic potion that’s going to solve our party’s woes with His­pan­ics,” he said.

Boehner also refused to swing behind any of Obama’s gun-control pro­pos­als and said he opposed the president’s plan to raise the min­i­mum wage to $9 an hour.

The Ohio Repub­li­can said he gets along well with Obama but admits their rela­tion­ship hasn’t gen­er­ated much in the way of results, point­ing to two failed rounds of bud­get talks in 2011 and at the end of last year. Boehner is frus­trated that spend­ing cuts Obama sig­naled he would agree to in 2011 have been taken off the table since the election.

“It hasn’t been real pro­duc­tive the last two years, and frankly every time I’ve got­ten into one of these high-profile nego­ti­a­tions, it’s my rear end that got burnt,” Boehner said. “It’s just prob­a­bly not the best way for our gov­ern­ment to operate.”

Obama stumped Wednes­day in sup­port of his minimum-wage plan, his calls for a man­u­fac­tur­ing revival and his other State of the Union pro­pos­als in a trip to Ashville, N.C., where he said: “If you work full time, you shouldn’t be in poverty.” He takes his case to Geor­gia on Thurs­day and his home­town of Chicago on Fri­day, all part of his effort to build pop­u­lar sup­port for an agenda fac­ing stiff resis­tance back in Washington.

“It’s not a Demo­c­ra­tic thing or a Repub­li­can thing,” Obama said of his ini­tia­tives. “Our job as Amer­i­cans is to restore that basic bar­gain that says if you work hard, if you meet your respon­si­bil­i­ties, you can get ahead.”

The imme­di­ate agenda, though, is dom­i­nated by $85 bil­lion in auto­matic, across-the-board spend­ing cuts — called a sequester in Washington-speak — set to slam the Pen­ta­gon and domes­tic pro­grams over the com­ing seven months. Boehner said he has no plans to res­ur­rect leg­is­la­tion passed by Repub­li­cans last year to block this year’s sequester.

The speaker said that until Obama puts for­ward a plan to avoid the sequester and Sen­ate Democ­rats pass it, “we’re going to be stuck with it. It’s going to be a lit­tle bleak around here when this actu­ally hap­pens and peo­ple actu­ally have to make decisions.”

Boehner noted that while plenty of GOP defense hawks are anx­ious about the auto­matic cuts, Democ­rats con­cerned with cuts to domes­tic pro­grams have a lot on the line, too.

And he sounded glum about prospects that the two sides will come together in the spring on a sep­a­rate, long-term bud­get blue­print to address the government’s fis­cal problems.

“It’s hard to imag­ine that you could rec­on­cile (the sep­a­rate bud­gets) the House and Sen­ate pass,” Boehner said. “But at some point, in some man­ner, it almost has to hap­pen if we’re going to deal with our long-term spend­ing problem.”

In March, the House and Sen­ate will take up com­pet­ing long-term bud­get blue­prints. In a break with past years, House Repub­li­cans promise to bal­ance the bud­get within a decade — with­out addi­tional tax increases beyond the $600 billion-plus in tax increases on wealth­ier earn­ers won by Obama as part of a deal to keep the rest of the Bush-era tax cuts.

He said that an impasse with Sen­ate Democ­rats, who insist their rival bud­get plan will raise taxes and con­tain softer bud­get cuts, is prob­a­bly inevitable.

Also loom­ing is the need to pass leg­is­la­tion financ­ing the gov­ern­ment through the bud­get year end­ing Sept. 30. Here, at least, Boehner saw some promise, pre­dict­ing a res­o­lu­tion will pass soon to head off a par­tial shutdown.

Washington’s most pow­er­ful Repub­li­can was also non-committal on two of Obama’s top second-term ini­tia­tives: over­haul­ing the nation’s immi­gra­tion laws and enact­ing stricter gun con­trol measures.

On immi­gra­tion, Boehner told the AP he was “encour­aged” by bipar­ti­san efforts to reform the nation’s frac­tured laws, but wouldn’t say whether he would sup­port a bill that includes a path­way to cit­i­zen­ship for 11 mil­lion ille­gal immi­grants. Nor would he com­mit to a path­way to cit­i­zen­ship for the so-called “dream­ers” — young peo­ple brought to the U.S illegally.

“I’m not get­ting myself locked into a cor­ner on what I’m for or what I’m against,” he said.

On gun con­trol, Boehner said he would con­sider mea­sures passed by the Democratic-led Sen­ate, but would not pledge to hold votes on any of Obama’s core prin­ci­ples, includ­ing uni­ver­sal back­ground checks for all gun pur­chasers. The expanded back­ground checks are broadly sup­ported by the public.

While not out­right oppos­ing back­ground checks or Obama’s other calls for lim­it­ing assault weapons and high-capacity ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines, the speaker said he pre­ferred focus­ing on the link between mass shoot­ings and men­tal health issues.

“When you look at all these mass shoot­ings, almost every one of the indi­vid­u­als involved has a his­tory of men­tal ill­ness. So why don’t we focus in on some­thing real that really can attempt to min­i­mize this prob­lem, as opposed to some quick polit­i­cal fix that gives peo­ple a false sense of secu­rity,” Boehner said. “There could be some link between men­tal ill­ness and back­ground checks. there’s a nexus there where you could have some real impact.”

Despite the some­times frus­trat­ing nature of the job, Boehner says he’ll run for Speaker again in two years, assum­ing Repub­li­cans keep con­trol of the House.

“Absolutely. I’ve got a big job to do and I intend to get it done.”

Posted by AP News on Feb 13 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.