WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama sits down with opposition Republican leaders Tuesday to chart a course for his legislative agenda, hoping to find a way forward on key issues from taxes to a new nuclear arms treaty with Russia.
The president is pushing for action on those issues in the final weeks of the current Congress, where Democrats still control both chambers. The Republicans become the majority in the House of Representatives when the new Congress convenes early next year.
"My hope is that tomorrow's meeting will mark a first step toward a new and productive working relationship," Obama said Monday, "because we now have a shared responsibility to deliver for the American people on the issues that define not only these times, but our future."
Obama will be meeting with House and Senate leaders from both parties — eight altogether — in a session that will help define the interaction between the White House and a divided Congress for the next two years.
Obama had sought a meeting with top legislative leaders of both parties before Congress took a break for last week's Thanksgiving holiday. He was rebuffed by the newly empowered Republicans. Tuesday's meeting could be all the more tense for the opposition-imposed delay.
Republicans are savoring the thumping they gave Democrats in the Nov. 2 election, a vote that gave the party control of the House of Representatives in a landslide and significantly cut into the Democratic majority in the Senate.
In a double bylined op-ed piece Tuesday in The Washington Post, House Speaker-to-be John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled that any compromises with the White House on spending and tax cuts would have to be on their terms.
"We can work together and accomplish these things, but the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress first will have to prioritize," they wrote. "It's time to choose struggling middle-class families and small businesses over the demands of the liberal base. It's time to get serious."
Already bedeviled by the WikiLeaks weekend release of classified diplomatic reports, Obama left responding to the embarrassing disclosures to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman.
Instead, he sought to take the offensive domestically by announcing that he wanted Congress to freeze the pay of civilian federal government employees as a step toward cutting the huge U.S. budget deficit.
With an eye to the turmoil caused by the out-of-control debt of some European countries, American politicians in both parties are clearly worried that the world financial system might start demanding higher interest rates to lend to what is seen as an over-leveraged Washington.
By hitting government workers with the pay freeze, Obama was showing Republicans he is serious about cutting red ink, an issue that played a major role in their November rout of the Democrats.
Republicans applauded Obama's announcement of the pay freeze; traditional Democratic allies, including the AFL-CIO labor federation, denounced it as shortsighted.
Still to be dealt with is Obama's insistence that Congress allow the year-end expiration of tax cuts for upper income Americans. Those reductions expire in tandem with similar cuts for those in lower tax brackets, which Obama and most Democrats want to extend.
Both tax cut measures were passed during the administration of former President George W. Bush. Business-friendly Republicans, who typically stand for lower taxes, are fighting hard to keep in place the cuts for both income groups.
Without compromise, all Americans would face a significant tax increase starting New Year's Day — a dismal outcome for politicians of both parties.
One of the top House Republicans, Rep. Eric Cantor, said on NBC television Tuesday that Republicans are not inclined to back off their insistence that the Bush era tax cuts be preserved for all, including the wealthy.
Also hanging fire and important for U.S.-Russian relations is the new START agreement signed in April by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The pact calls for further reductions in nuclear weapons, building on steep cuts achieved in the original START agreement that expired at the end of 2009.
The Senate has not ratified the treaty, as required by the Constitution, and the Russians have made clear that Obama's attempt to reset relations with Moscow depends heavily on Washington putting the pact into force.
Sen. Jon Kyl, one of the Republicans invited to Tuesday's meeting, has rejected the administration's assertion that the treaty must be dealt with during the lame-duck session. Kyl contends the Senate has more pressing issues to deal with.
Sen. John McCain, a fellow Republican, appeared in a televised interview on Tuesday to leave open the possibility of working with the White House on START. "I believe that we could move forward with the START treaty and satisfy Sen. Kyl's concerns and mine about missile defense and others," McCain said on ABC's "Good Morning America."
Another Republican, Sen. George Voinovich, who earlier this month expressed misgivings about the treaty's impact on former Soviet satellite nations, told reporters, "I'd like to get it done, but in my conscience I want to feel it's the right thing to do."
Republican Sen. Mark Kirk was asked about the latest wrinkle, Russian President Medvedev's warning that a new arms race will erupt if Russia and the West cannot agree about a joint European missile defense program.
"I'm open-minded, and this is one of the issues I'll raise with the State Department briefing teams coming up to talk to me," he said.
Of particular importance is Russia's new policy of joining with Washington against Iran's suspected attempts to build a nuclear weapon.
In the past, such treaties usually have won broad bipartisan support, but in the angry political climate in the U.S. capital these days Republicans are blocking a Senate vote on the pact in the remaining weeks of the current Congress.
They apparently are hoping to put the issue off until the next sitting of Congress when the Democrats' Senate majority will have diminished. Treaty approval requires 67 affirmative votes in the 100-seat Senate.
When the next Congress convenes, the Democrats will hold just 53 seats, including the votes of two independents who usually vote with them. They currently hold 59 seats.
Obama campaigned successfully for the White House on vows to defuse the partisanship in Washington, but in his first two years in office he has won no Republican support for the key items of his legislative agenda that were pushed through to passage by strong Democratic majorities in both chambers.
Having lost the House and with a diminished majority in the Senate, Obama faces a difficult test of that promise to change the way business is conducted in Washington.
Obama's ability to reach compromises is further complicated by the internal politics within each of the parties. The House lost many of its moderates in the midterm elections, leaving a more liberal caucus for the next Congress. Republicans are keenly aware of a conservative tea party movement that punished Republican lawmakers seen as too willing to cross party lines.
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