James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
12:43 P.M. EST
MR. CARNEY: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the White House for your daily briefing. I know there’s a call time for the Medal of Honor ceremony, so we’re going to have to keep this quick so everybody who wants to attend, or is scheduled to attend, can do that.
I just wanted to note at the top — and I’ll do this quickly — that you probably saw a blog post by Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer over the weekend that makes clear a couple of points, and that is that, first, there is no reason why we should allow the sequester, with its indiscriminate cuts, to take effect. It is wholly false that the President has not put forward proposals that would eliminate the sequester. In fact, he’s done it three times — first, with his proposal to the super committee, which would have eliminated the sequester entirely. That was the whole idea behind the super committee’s work. Second, with his budget. And third, in his proposal to Speaker Boehner, which met Republicans more than halfway on spending cuts and entitlement reforms and revenues late last year.
We call on Congress — as you heard the President do — to allow itself the time and space to work together towards a broader budget agreement that eliminates the sequester entirely and reduces our deficit further by passing a short-term delay in the sequester in a balanced, responsible way — without drama, without delay, without inflicting the kind of unnecessary wound on our economy that we should absolutely not be allowing to happen at this time.
So I would also like to address briefly the fallacious assertions that Republicans have been making about who wants the sequester and who doesn’t. Let’s just be clear: When the Budget Control Act passed on August 11th, 2011, through the House of Representatives, it passed by a vote of 269 to 161. Based on statements by Republicans today, you would have thought that the vast majority of that vote was from Democrats. Well, in fact, 174 of the 269 were Republicans, House Republicans. Only 95 Democrats voted for that bill. And that included every Republican leader — Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Cantor, Congressman McCarthy, Congressman Ryan. The Speaker of the House, John Boehner, that day told CBS, “I got 98 percent of what I wanted. I’m pretty happy.”
So I’m not sure how that squares with some of the commentary we’ve seen in the last few weeks.
With that, I’ll take your questions. Jim.
Q Thanks, Jay. On that issue, particularly on the short-term solution that buys time and space, some lawmakers are suggesting that Congress could give the President authority to better target some of these cuts in the short term. Would the President be amenable to that? That would be one way to avoid the kind …read more
Source: White House Press Office