Obama veto threat for corporate tax breaks
Officials tell CBS News that top White House aides have been on the phone today warning House and Senate negotiators on a tax extenders bill that President Obama would veto the bill as it's currently formulated.
"The President would veto the proposed deal because it would provide permanent tax breaks to help well-connected corporations while neglecting working families," said White House Deputy Press Secretary Jen Friedman.
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and the head of Legislative Affairs, Katie Beirne-Fallon, have been leading the charge--calling drafters of the legislation to complain, principally, about the move to make many of the existing tax credits permanent. The White House objects, on the merits, to some of the tax credits and breaks but has allowed them to be extended on a temporary basis over the years. The White House is in no mood to extend them permanently while Democrats still control the lame-duck Senate.
If Republicans want the tax credits extended permanently--so goes the White House thinking--they can put a bill together in the next Congress, pass it in the House and see if they can move it through a potential 60-vote filibuster gauntlet. That's a process the White House wants to see play out in the next Congress, rather than accept the deal now, with Democrats still in charge of the Senate.
What's unusual about this is there is no drafted bill yet--just reports about what has been agreed upon by the House and Senate. The White House is taking the unusual step of issuing a veto threat now to jar Democrats into awareness about the underlying details. This appears to be part of the ongoing saga of the rough relationship with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who is reported to be a key negotiator. The White House hopes the veto threat redirects the course of the bill and leads to a redrafting when Congress returns to Washington after Thanksgiving.
If the bill passes Congress, this would be the President's third and most significant veto. He's threatened to veto 18 bills, most of them repeals of Obamacare. The two vetoes he's actually issued came without warning and were relatively minor, according to USA Today. One was on a stopgap spending measure that USA Today noted "became redundant when Congress passed a full-year spending bill the same day," and the other was a "minor bill that consumer advocates tried to scuttle at the last minute because it could have helped speed up foreclosures."
Given that the President faces a Republican Senate and House, it seems likely that he'll be taking out his veto pen more frequently in the last two years of his term.
