Eric Cantor floats year-end trigger bargain

Eric Cantor floats year-end trigger bargain
By JAKE SHERMAN & MANU RAJU | 11/30/11 8:11 PM EST

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is quietly working both sides of the Capitol to build support for a plan to rework automatic spending cuts and combine the proposal with a wide range of critical year-end tax and spending measures.

What it amounts to is a major year-end pitch: Democrats and President Barack Obama would get their much sought-after payroll tax cut extension and jobless benefits, while Republicans would tweak the Pentagon cuts that defense hawks hate.

The White House has already sent out a warning against messing with these so-called trigger spending cuts born out of the deficit supercommittee’s failure, so it’s far from clear that Cantor’s maneuvering could win enough support on Capitol Hill.

Cantor has spoken to senators from both parties — including a Thanksgiving morning phone call to the Stamford, Conn., home of Sen. Joe Lieberman — as he gauges support for a potential package that would include up to $133 billion in spending cuts in exchange for delaying the first year of slashes to defense and nondefense programs slated to begin in 2013. That package could also include a reform and a yearlong extension of jobless benefits, a payroll tax break and the Medicare reimbursement rate for physicians.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/69489.html

The House won’t be taking up changes to mandatory cuts to defense spending anytime soon despite increasing calls from GOP defense hawks and some leaders to tackle the issue this year.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) had been holding discussions with House and Senate Republicans and Democrats — including Sen. Joe Lieberman (I.-Conn.) — about attaching changes to the sequester’s defense cuts to must-pass unemployment and tax legislation this year.

The sequester is $1.2 trillion of automatic cuts to defense and domestic spending that had originally been designed to force the super committee to come to a broad deficit deal. But now that the effort has failed, the cold reality of major reductions to defense spending has spooked Republicans who are eager to roll them back.

But Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who had given his blessing to Cantor’s efforts, now appears intent on pushing the issue until sometime next year.

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Cantor has spoken to senators from both parties — including a Thanksgiving morning phone call to the Stamford, Conn., home of Sen. Joe Lieberman