Ahead of lawmakers’ return to Capitol Hill for the final gasp of their lame duck session, the White House is struggling to refine an agenda packed with more hope than promise. Tax cuts, a nuclear arms treaty with Russia, a budget resolution, unemployment benefits, gays in the military and immigration are all on the administration’s to-do list.
“There is no doubt we have plenty of work left to do,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
Next week could prove critical on several fronts. A Pentagon-authored report on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which bars gays from serving openly in the military, is set for release. Also pending is a report from the president’s deficit reduction commission on ways to cut the budget.
And the delayed meeting and dinner at the White House with Republican and Democratic lawmakers is back on the schedule amid hope for improved atmospherics after Republicans canceled the meeting last week.
Increasingly, the politics are getting tougher for the White House while the agenda remains full.
“I think the president said that we live in an atmosphere in this town that normally, if one side wants to do something, then the other side doesn’t want to do something,” Gibbs said.
President Obama last week summoned Democratic leaders to the White House to plot a strategy for preserving Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class while jettisoning tax cuts for the wealthy.
Rather than imposing his own plan on the group, Obama indicated he would follow their lead. But Democrats — notably House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. — have lost so much leverage in Congress after the last election, it is not clear they can muster the votes.
So the president this week laid out his own plan: Extend tax cuts for the middle class and tell wealthy taxpayers to start paying up.
“If we allow these taxes to go up, the result would be that a lot of people most likely would spend less, and that means that the economy would grow less,” Obama said. “So we ought to resolve this issue in the next couple of weeks.”
The White House believes it has deficit hawk Republicans boxed in on tax cuts with the argument that extending the tax break for the rich would cost $700 billion.
The Treasury Department estimates that making all tax cuts permanent would cost $3.7 trillion over 10 years.
A more likely scenario — a compromise that might work for both parties — would be a temporary extension of one or both sets of tax cuts that could cost no more than $500 billion.
Obama is personally lobbying lawmakers on tax cuts and also on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a nuclear disarmament pact with Russia on which some Republicans are stalling. Obama has cited the START pact as critical to reviving relations with Russia.
Vice President Biden is taking a central role in pushing for START, lobbying his former colleagues in the Senate. He also wrote an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, making the case for the treaty as a cornerstone to relations with Russia.
