President Barack Obama (White House photo)
A deal's a deal, says the White House. President Obama's promise to veto any bill changing the automatic spending cuts agreed to in the August debt ceiling deal
holds.
President Barack Obama isn't open to renegotiating the spending cuts triggered by the supercommittee’s failure to reach a deficit-reduction deal even as some Democrats float the possibility, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday.
"The president's been very clear on this. The answer is no," Carney said on MSNBC's "Daily Rundown." [...]
"The sequester was designed to be so onerous, to have the kinds of cuts that were so objectionable to members of both parties in Congress that they would never come to pass, that they would force Congress to work hard and reach a compromise that was responsible and balanced to reduce our deficit and deal with our long-term debt challenge," Carney said. "The president believes that the very nature of the sequester needs to stay the same to keep the pressure on Congress to do its job."
One Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), suggested the idea of renegotiating the automatic cuts in exchange for extending the payroll tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year. Of course, Clyburn isn't really in a position to make that offer, being in the minority party in the House, but his position as a member of the now defunct Super Congress means that people listen to him on this stuff.
