or default. you know, i believe i have to act in the best interest of the country. and every time we ve been dpronted with a potential crisis, the guy you re looking at is the one that stepped up and solved the problem, whether it was the fiscal cliff deal at the end of 2012 when everybody s taxes were going up, whenever it was last october in the 16th day of the government shutdown, or yesterday, or thursday, when it was clear that we needed to produce enough procedural votes to get to a debt ceiling vote in order to avoid a defall. my job is to protect the country when i can. and to step up and lead on those occasions when it s required. that s what i did. joining me now, former ohio congressman steve latourette. he s president of the main street partnership. and joseph girth, political
country. and every time we ve been confronted with a potential crisis, the guy you re looking at is the one that stepped up and solved the problem, whether it was the fiscal cliff deal at the end of 2012 when everybody s taxes were going up, whenever it was last october in the 16th day of the government shutdown, or yesterday, or thursday, when it was clear that we needed to produce enough procedural votes to get to a debt ceiling vote in order to avoid a default. my job is to protect the country when i can. and to step up and lead on those occasions when it s required. that s what i did. joining me now, former ohio congressman steve latourette. he s president of the main street partnership. and joseph girth, political writer for the courier journal in kentucky. you were present when mitch mcconnell was being pressed to answer that.
wealthiest americans, maybe you remember the fiscal cliff deal, the deal brought a ton of new tax revenue into the federal government by not only allowing the high-end bush tax cuts to expire but also by raising things like the capital gains attack. so president obama started off this year with the deal to end most of the high end bush tax cuts, something he had been trying to do for a long time. something he campaigned on in the 2012 election. now he is ending the year with a two-year budget deal that will likely avert a government shutdown. so this is not the most momentous day in the republican history, we wouldn t look back and say where were you in 2013, when congress passed the budget? but this is still a significant budget. the one in january and the one today, are important deals. yet as the senate was preparing to complete the deal, politico was asking this important question, which president had the worst year 2005, it was the
is if the senate republican leader mitch mcconnell could deliver 25 republicans votes in the senate, more than half his conference. 40 republicans voted for the fiscal cliff deal, five of those no longer in the senate. that s your ceiling. there s 35 senate republicans who have voted with mitch mcconnell before. would they vote with him again on a giant deal that gets us out of a cliff mess? can they get anywhere close to the number? mcconnell, who spoke to the president yesterday and reid, are now both racing the clock to sell the plan to lawmakers before the u.s. borrowing authority runs out this weekend. the calendar is, of course, is enemy here. they may not be able to pass this bill because of procedural issues for a few days. a single senator can use procedural tactics to push the final vote past the october 17th deadline. and yesterday ted cruz deflected questions about whether he plans to try to delay a vote, saying we need to see what the details are. roll call reports cruz me
moment. if we have the president of the united states with a democratic senate not being able to get anything done in his entire second term? simple case, fiscal cliff deal, gun control, immigration, he s gotten squat. he s not going to get squat on any of those, and it s because of the reality of washington. if you go back to the very beginning of the year, obviously, the tax deal was a big win for him. the question, i guess, is was it such a big win, quite frankly, that it recalibrated every other republican s view of whether we re going to enter into any deals or negotiations for the rest of the year? i think that certainly is up for some discussion. but what s the president going to do to put pressure on house republicans for immigration reform when less than two dozen of them have any appreciable hispanic population? they re all insulate sd.