WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders struggled on Tuesday night to rally their colleagues around a backup measure to ease the sting of a looming fiscal crisis by allowing tax rates to rise only on incomes over $1 million.
The Fiscal Deadline in Washington
The New York Times is following the talks between President Obama and Congressional leaders on the so-called fiscal cliff.
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The plan would leave in place across-the-board spending cuts to military and domestic programs that Republicans have been warning could have dire consequences, especially to national defense.
Speaker John A. Boehner unveiled what he dubbed “Plan B” less than 24 hours after President Obama offered a more comprehensive deal that would raise tax rates on incomes over $400,000 and, over 10 years, produce $1.2 trillion in tax increases and cut $930 billion in spending.
Mr. Boehner pledged to continue negotiating on a broad deficit-reduction deal but called the president’s plan unbalanced and insufficient.
“What we’ve offered meets the definition of a balanced approach, but the president is not there yet,” Mr. Boehner said Tuesday.
The Boehner proposal was intended to raise the pressure on Democrats to compromise further still by embracing a tax increase on millionaires first pushed by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader.
Confronted with her past support for raising income taxes only on millionaires, Ms. Pelosi said that effort had merely been “a plan to smoke out” Republicans.
But a protracted meeting of the House Republican Conference on Tuesday night made it clear that passage of Mr. Boehner’s proposal would be difficult. Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was not sure he could support a bill that would allow $500 billion in military cuts over the next 10 years and indicated that other Republicans on his committee shared his concern.
Representative John Fleming, a conservative Republican from Louisiana, dismissed the speaker’s plan as a pointless “messaging exercise.”
“Why go on record raising taxes on anybody if it won’t cut spending and won’t even become law?” he asked. “I haven’t found a way of supporting that.”
Ms. Pelosi was leaning hard on House Democrats to stay united in their opposition. If she succeeds, the speaker could afford about only 18 Republican defections, fewer than he has had on any major fiscal vote since Republicans took control two years ago.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta was unsparing on Tuesday in his criticism of lawmakers resisting a deal to stop the military cuts.
“It is unacceptable to me that men and women who put their lives on the line in distant lands have to worry about whether those here in Washington can effectively support them,” Mr. Panetta said in a speech at the National Press Club. “We’re down to the wire now. In these next few days, Congress needs to make the right decisions to avoid the fiscal disaster that awaits us.”
Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, an influential Republican, said the Pentagon cuts would damage not only military readiness but also the fragile economy.
House Republican leaders on Tuesday night sought to assess whether the speaker’s proposal could be brought to the House floor on Thursday. Under that plan, the House would take up take up tax legislation and consider two amendments. The first would mirror a Senate-passed bill to extend the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for incomes below $250,000. That would be expected to fail, as a show to the president that his initial offer cannot pass.
A second amendment would raise that threshold to incomes below $1 million. The House may also vote on some middle ground, like the president’s $400,000.
Mr. Boehner told House Republicans that he would also like the bill to include provisions to prevent the existing alternative minimum tax from expanding to impact more of the middle class and to extend existing low tax rates on inherited estates.
But he said the bill would not cancel across-the-board spending cuts — known as sequestration — that are scheduled to total $110 billion in 2013 and more than $1 trillion over 10 years.
Republicans would resume the fight for broad spending cuts, especially to entitlement programs like Medicare, in late January or February, when the government will face raising its borrowing limit and when, many Republicans believe, they will have much more leverage than they do now.
The White House came out strongly against the speaker’s plan. The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said that it could not pass the Senate and “therefore will not protect middle-class families” from large tax increases schedule to begin on Jan. 1.
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