Congress Leaves Town; As Fiscal Cliff Gets Nearer, GOP Goes Home; Should GOP Declare Victory on Taxes?
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Happening now: Congress takes a chance of looking bad by leaving town before making a deal on the fiscal cliff. What's going on? If you take an aspirin to prevent heart trouble, check the label. Our own Dr. Sanjay Gupta, he tells us what a new study says about the effects of coated tablets. We will also hear what happened during an in-flight emergency during one of the world's newest high-tech planes. I'm Wolf Blitzer. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM. With just 27 days to go until all of us are hit with tax increases and federal spending takes an across-the-board a cut of some $55 billion, the people who have it in their power to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff aren't negotiating, they're not even debating right now, so many of them simply leaving town. But there's more going on than meets the eye. Let's bring in our senior congressional correspondent, Dana Bash. She has the very latest. Dana, what is going on?</s>DANA BASH, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, there's so much political theater around here right now, you could sell tickets. One of today's acts was the House leaving.</s>BASH (voice-over): Lawmakers streaming out of the Capitol Hill, racing to their cars to get to the airport and go home. It's a scene you usually see on a Thursday afternoon or Friday morning, not Wednesday at noon.</s>REP. JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Good morning.</s>BASH: House Republican leaders told members they're free to leave, because they have nothing to vote on. (on camera): I understand that you all are saying that there's just no legislation to put on the floor. But when it comes to just pure optics of the House leaving with the fiscal cliff right in front of us...</s>BOEHNER: I will be here and I will be available at any moment to sit down with the president to get serious about solving this problem.</s>BASH (voice-over): In fact, sending lawmakers home is a way for House Republicans to illustrate their current message. Your move, Mr. President.</s>BOEHNER: We need a response from the White House. We can't sit here and negotiate with ourselves.</s>BASH: House Speaker John Boehner made a point of expressing dismay that the president still hasn't responded two days after the Republicans sent him a fiscal cliff counteroffer.</s>BOEHNER: If the president doesn't agree with our proposal and our outline, I think he's got an obligation to send one to the Congress and a plan that can pass both chambers of Congress.</s>BASH: By trying to keep GOP frustration focused on the president, Boehner appears to be keeping conservative lawmakers off his own back for now. (on camera): What's mood inside the conference?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Very united, very supportive with the speaker.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're united.</s>BASH (voice-over): Multiple sources tell CNN in a private meeting with House Republicans, Boehner got no blowback for proposing $800 billion in tax revenue, despite a very real backlash from conservative groups outside Congress. (on camera): Any complaints about this new revenue in the counterproposal?</s>REP. JOHN MICA (R), FLORIDA: I didn't hear anything.</s>REP. CHARLES BOUSTANY JR. (R), LOUISIANA: The speaker has full support of the conference to move forward and to get something done for the American people.</s>BASH (voice-over): So far, rank and time Republicans are allowing Boehner to play out this carefully choreographed high-stakes showdown, trying to look reasonable while the president is intransigent, especially since Republicans privately admit they have been losing the message war to the White House on protecting the wealthy.</s>BOEHNER: The revenues we're putting on the table are going to come from, guess who, the rich. There are ways to limit deductions, close loopholes and have the same people pay more of their money to the federal government without raising tax rates, which we believe will harm our economy.</s>BASH: But, Wolf, one prominent conservative in the Senate is breaking ranks with his party over the whole idea of raising tax rates for the wealthy. Tom Coburn, the Republican from Oklahoma, he told MSNBC today he would be OK with doing what the president wants, raising taxes on the wealthy, as long as it is coupled with entitlement reform and spending cuts. The reason we're told is because he believes at this point it's better to do that to get what he and other Republicans want long term, which is a fundamental overhaul of the tax code, and that perhaps they can get that and better chance getting that if they give the president what he wants now. You remember, Coburn was among the first Republicans a couple years ago to say it was OK to raise revenue as part of deficit reduction. Now he appears to be the first Senate Republican to say he would be OK with raising rates as long as it's part of that broader package I described.</s>BLITZER: As far as we know right now, a meeting or a phone call between John Boehner and President Obama, is that at all in the works?</s>BASH: As far as we know, no. Whether it's in the works, we could only hope, but at this point we do not have any indication that it is scheduled right now. Never mind the principals. We don't have any word that there has been communications between their staffs at all. What's playing out of the public still appears to be playing out in private, which is not a lot.</s>BLITZER: Meanwhile, the members are going home for a nice long weekend. Thanks very much, Dana, for that. For his part, President Obama isn't negotiating either, as we just heard. He's using events like today's meeting with business leaders to try to pressure Republicans into agreeing to raise the tax rates on the rich right now as a down payment on a larger deal to come later as far as taxes are concerned and Medicare is concerned.</s>BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let's allow higher rates to go up for the top 2 percent. That includes all of you, yes, but not in any way that's going to affect your spending, your lifestyles or the economy in any significant way. Let's make sure that 98 percent of Americans don't see a single dime in tax increases next year, 97 percent of small businesses don't see a single dime an increase in taxes next year. And by doing that alone, we raise almost a trillion dollars.</s>BLITZER: Let's bring in our chief political analyst, Gloria Borger, right now. The president also had a specific warning for members of Congress, the Republicans on the issue of raising the debt ceiling. Listen to this.</s>OBAMA: If Congress in any way suggests that they're going to tie negotiations to debt ceiling votes, and take us to the brink of default once again as part of a budget negotiation, which, by the way, we have never done in our history, until we did it last year, I will not play that game, because we have got to break that habit before it starts.</s>BLITZER: Easy to say I will not play that game, but if the Republican majority in the House says they're not voting to raise the debt ceiling, he says, I won't play that game, what is he going to do?</s>GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: The president has a lot of leverage here, Wolf. Look, he just won this election. It's not like the debt ceiling debacle in 2011 went over well with the American public. The American public was disgusted by it. It was brinksmanship that people do not like to see in a recession. They thought it endangered the economy, and Republicans also know that if you look at the polls -- and they look at the polls -- that the public would blame them if we go over the fiscal cliff by a 2-1 margin. So I would say that, right now -- and I think even Republicans would stipulate this, Wolf -- the president has the leverage here. I mean, Republicans also know that if they were to go over the cliff that the tax cuts on the wealthy would increase. You could come back and undue the tax cuts on the middle class expiring. But the president's in a pretty good bargaining position here, which is why you see him sort of hold firm.</s>BLITZER: What leverage do the Republicans have?</s>BORGER: Well, look, I think it -- they understand that for some liberals going over the cliff is OK, because liberals will say, oh, you know what, we get those defense cuts we wouldn't get otherwise, and they believe that the public would not like to see that. And I think at some point, Wolf, you have to say, I don't know when it is, but at some point the president and his people as Dana Bash was just talking about need to get to the negotiating table. Let's be fair to the House speaker. He put a plan on the table that included revenues, substantial revenues, not raising the rates. I mean, that's the big problem. But he did do that. Lots of outside conservative groups are now railing against him. But he did put something on the table that was a serious plan, and the White House is not dealing with him on it. So the president has leverage, but at a certain point they all have to behave like grownups, you would think.</s>BLITZER: The former House Speaker Newt Gingrich knows something about going eyeball to eyeball with a Democratic president. That happened back in the '90s with Bill Clinton. Listen to what he says about the fiscal cliff.</s>SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: I think that no deal is better than a bad deal. I think going off this cliff is less dangerous than letting things build up for a year or two years to have an even bigger cliff. I think that the president clearly has staked out a position of non- seriousness, and I think it's very difficult for the House Republicans right now to find any practical way to get his attention.</s>BLITZER: He's saying go over the cliff rather than accept what the president wants right now.</s>BORGER: Yes. I don't need to remind you that this is the House speaker who shut down the government.</s>BLITZER: Twice.</s>BORGER: Right. And that didn't work so well for the Republicans. Going over the cliff is something I don't think they want to do, as I was saying earlier. Some liberals may want to do it. As I keep saying, Wolf, the irony to me here is that the larger issues are things they really understand how to resolve, if you look at all their proposals. They just can't get there, because they can't agree on this revenue issue. Where does the revenue come from? Do you raise the rates on the wealthy? If you do, how much? And that's actually in the whole realm of things a sticking point that one would presume if they actually got in a room, they could get over. And don't forget, Wolf, these people invented the fiscal cliff. They invented it, brought us to the fiscal cliff because they knew when they were up against it, that they might be forced to act. The thought now that they would actually push the cliff off again is ridiculous.</s>BLITZER: We will see what happens, if the ridiculous happens. All right, thank you, Gloria.</s>BORGER: It might.</s>BLITZER: By the way, we're going to have a major debate later this hour. A pair of prominent House members, they will exchange their views on how to avoid the fiscal cliff, whether Republicans should declare they have already won, what's going on. Stand by, big debate coming up. Also ahead, a radio station prank turns into an international embarrassment. You're about to hear what happened when royal impersonators called the hospital where Prince William's pregnant wife, Catherine, is staying.