In The News

Lawmakers diverge over fiscal cliff 
The Holland Sentinel - Andrea Goodell
December 28, 2012

Washington, D.C. —  It’s going to be one heck of a New Year’s Eve on Capitol Hill.

As the clock ticks down, lawmakers on both side of the aisle are struggling to devise a solution to avert a plunge over the fiscal cliff and into higher taxes for everyone.

The atmosphere was tense Friday as congressional leaders met with President Barack Obama in a last ditch effort.

“We are in meeting after meeting in the Senate. You know the House isn’t in session unfortunately,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow said.

The House will reconvene Sunday evening.

“Welcome to groundhog day,” said Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Zeeland. “I’ve got to tell you, it’s a little frustrating. Once again, it feels like the House has done its work previously and the Senate has failed to do what needs to be done.”

As of late Friday morning, Huizenga and his family were getting ready to hit the road for Washington.

“I may be ringing in the New Year on the House floor with my kids in the balcony,” the freshman lawmaker said. “It is obviously not going to be good if we have this date transpire without any action.”

Without action everyone — everyone — will see a tax increase. That includes estate taxes, capital gains and income taxes as well as 2 percent of each paycheck going back to Social Security.

Most agree that isn’t likely. More likely is a kick-the-can scenario.

“That is, unfortunately, what Washington does best, is keep kicking that can down the road,” Huizenga said. “The idea of moving forward with this without any serious reform to our spending habits is really disturbing to me, to a lot of people.”

Huizenga believes some sort of package of tax cuts for middle class will come out of negotiations — “I just don’t know what that is going to look like or frankly how quickly we are going to be able to do it.”

The lack of predictably hurts businesses, he said.

“There’s three parts to solving the deficit,” Stabenow said. “One is spending, and we’ve agreed to $1.6 trillion dollars — trillion — in spending cuts. .... The second piece is entitlements, and we’ve already agreed to cut spending in Medicare by $700 billion through cutting overpayments to insurance companies. The third piece is raising revenue and asking the wealthiest Americans to help solve the deficit. And that’s the one part we cannot get agreement on.”

The crevasse between Republican and Democrat, House and Senate has grown so vast, bridging it has become difficult, Stabenow said.

“I’m an eternal optimist,” Stabenow said. “I think as long as we can keep people talking, there is no excuse to not get this resolved”

“I think there’s elements on both sides that aren’t willing to budge at all,” Huizenga said, “but I think there’s a majority of people who are realistic. The election occurred, and now we need to see how we can make this work.”

Speaker of the House John Boehner briefed his members after an afternoon meeting among congressional leaders and the president.

Part of a statement from Boehner's office reads: “The leaders spent the majority of the meeting discussing potential options and components for a plan that could pass both chambers of Congress. The speaker told the president that if the Senate amends the House-passed legislation and sends back a plan, the House will consider it — either by accepting or amending. The group agreed that the next step should be the Senate taking bipartisan action.”