'Fiscal cliff' talks turn sour: Are prospects for deal vanishing?
House Speaker John Boehner charges that 'no substantive progress has been made' to avoid the Dec. 31 fiscal cliff, but such comments are a part of negotiating, an expert says.
WASHINGTON
Meetings between Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and congressional leaders on Thursday marked the first post-election acrimony between the parties in their pursuit of a solution to the “fiscal cliff.”
Republicans stewed over the fact the White House has not offered them specific spending or entitlement changes. Democrats dismissed Republican complaints as empty posturing, saying that the GOP was on the verge of conceding to the Democratic goal of higher tax rates on the wealthy and that the onus is, in fact, on Republicans to spell out the entitlement and government spending reductions they seek.
Together, the statements by both parties end the brief honeymoon at the outset of negotiations and signal the “push-back moment,” where each party publicly retrenches in hopes of getting more out of its adversary, and where the possibility of a deal could still break for better or worse, says Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University.
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