white house is that the economy will go back into recession and the white house will end up being blamed for this regardless of who may or may not be at fault right now. david nakamura and we alluded to this earlier that a lot of folks don t realize that this is a crisis that was created by congress. absolutely. a year and a half ago during the debt ceiling negotiations, they put this in place and they pushed it back to now to try to get them to this bigger deal that everybody was talking about and we had included spending cuts and a tax increase and this was supposed to be the deadline and now people are talking, can we push this back and come back and cut taxes and no one wants to make this decision, but they re going to have to soon, and i think all of this pressure on congress right now is going to lead to some sort of agreement whether it s now before january 1 or shortly thereafter, but something will happen this time. david jackson, if the senate can t reach a deal and the
actually participating and the workforce is down, so you have all of the economic components of this constant situation of where there are these constant fiscal problems. having said that, one of the things that you re seeing in this particular debate and why i m feeling better about this particular exchange is the sense that, look, when the policy outcome becomes greater than the political payoff, that s when you see bipartisan ship begin to emerge and i think what you re seeing from both sides is the policy outcome is becoming more important and you ll see it program that we ll move in that direction from the fiscal clef to the milk bill, if congress fails to act, the price of a gallon of milk could soar to $6 a gailon. it could be part any of fiscal
if an agreement isn t reached in time between senator reid and senator mcconnell, then i will urge senator reid to bring to the floor a basic package for an up or down vote. up or down vote. what kind of pressure would that put on members of congress? this is all about the blame game, craig. it takes 60 votes to do almost anything in the u.s. senate. for president obama calling for an up or down vote, for the senate which rarely happens he would be saying if any republican or groups of republicans ends up blocking the legislation, they would be the ones who would be blamed for going over the fiscal cliff and luke russert just outlined something else, too, if you even get 60 votes that then goes to the house the question is does house speaker john boehner and republicans allow that to come to the vote. if they don t, they ll be the ones to get the blame. so president obama was using his bully pulpit and the statement he gave yesterday and he ll be on meet the press tomorrow and
if they actually go to an up and down vote there will be a lot of pressure on those who were against a temporary fix with this to make their case known and actually go on the record. that s why the question is would the republican senators who would oppose this thing at the $250,000 level, they would use some of the mechanisms they have like the fill buster and things that the public doesn t like, but they re certainly part of the tools that the senators have to object to these things. would they block it? as mark murray said, this is about the blame game and setting up and if you ll block it, go on record to do so or you ll take the blame. david jackson, politically, what, in any, is the advantage to simply kicking the can down the road and allowing the next congress to craft a major debt reduction deal. on january 1, everyone s taxes will go up if only the expiration of the george w. bush tax cuts and this gives congress
cliff biel. it s being held up by republicans in the house upon are they concerned that they ll be seen as the amt party? this is crazy. we renewed the foreign bill every five years and there sa i lot of back and forth on this. that i can get this done. let me go back to something, craig, that we talked about a minute ago. the republicans have backed themselves into a corner where now they ll only bring something up if they had 218 votes on their own side and that means they won t negotiate on the democrats and they will have to produce votes on both sides of the aisle and that is very hard to do and when i was in congress during the 90s we had very interesting bipartisan votes and we had two resolutions authorizing the use of troops in iraq and one with bush xli and the other with bush xliii and we passed nafta on the bipartisan basis and trade relations with china on a bipartisan basis, and i m sorry, i can t accept this