Page 4 - Representative Boehner News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> thank you very much. >> i want you to put on your leadership cap because when you're up in vermont, you worked with republicans and democrats alike. you were always a deficit hawk up there. how do you convince me and the republican caucus to raise taxes which i find offensive, but i will do it because we need to all come together and make this deal. how do you convince me to raise taxes today for spending cuts that you claim are going to be coming 20 years from now? if you're john boehner, what's your message? >> you don't do that. that's why i think the cliff is not a bad solution. you can...

To that. look, the white house is well aware that they can't -- you know, the one reason why there's not meetings here? that's bad for boehner. boehner can't be seen here on, quote, enemy territory cutting the deal. right? it has -- i mean, look. the semantics matter. you hate to admit that it does, but it does. and the settings matter. that's why you're not seeing a lot of meetings here. >> it does and there are a lot of republicans -- remember newt gingrich going over to the white house through the budget negotiations in the 1990s, and newt gingrich's own words getting his pockets picked by ...

End of the year. i will let them all go away if that's what it takes to get the rate on top earners to go up. boehner knows that. he has a huge incentive to get something out of this deal. and the president has a huge incentive to get a deal because the last thing he wants is an economic funk to start his second term. that would be a bummer for him and a bummer for his policies. >> and if i was advising republicans, i would say you want to get re-elected? you want to be here on your party? look at chris christie. start to move over to the other side of the aisle. >> michael steele, i know you ...

To be quite honest. i'll tell you what the nub of the problem is, and it goes to what we talked about a little bit earlier. you have the president saying, i want tax rates to go up now on the promise that a future congress is going to cut the spending that you want done 20 years from now. and that's just a bargain that's hard for a lot of fiscal conservatives to swallow because that has been, as you know, joe, going back to certainly your time in congress, the deal that's always been bargained that's never been fulfilled. and so i don't know how john boehner negotiates and navigates that parti...

Pessimistic. there's no doubt that washington has a recent track record of usually botching opportunities to get things done. but if you take aside all the rhetoric, all the huffing and puffing, the people that have been involved in the negotiations over the last six months on this say that you can actually now see what the contours of a deal look like. it's certainly going to take a lot of hand wringing to get there, but it includes a tax hike somewhere north of $1 trillion which is basically the difference between boehner's position and obama's position. it includes medicare cuts, entitlemen...