WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lamented Speaker of the House John Boehner’s move to push forward with his “Plan B” instead of renewing talks with President Barack Obama on the fiscal cliff, skewering the Speaker for “wasting time” on a bill that will not pass when he and the president are only a few billion dollars apart in the proposals they have put forward.
“It is very, very, very unfortunate that Republicans wasted an entire week on another pointless, worthless stunt,” Reid told reporters at a press conference Thursday.
The House is slated to vote on the “Plan B” bill and the “Spending Reduction Act,” which would tackle the sequester by replacing it with a less severe spending cut, later this evening. But President Obama has said he would veto the bill, and Reid reiterated his opposition to the bill.
“Speaker Boehner’s plans are nonstarters in the Senate,” the Nevada Senator said.
“House Republicans know that the bill has no future,” he said. “If they don’t know it now, tell ’em what I said.”
Reid urged the House, if they wanted to enact some kind of back up measure to prevent the tax hike, to vote on the Senate-passed bill that would extend the tax hikes for those making less than $250,000 a year, saying he believed it would pass the House.
“We’re here, we’ve reached out to the Republicans in the House and told them, ‘get back and start talking to the President. You have a multi-trillion dollar deal that you’ve been talking about, multi-trillion dollar deal. You’re a couple hundred billion dollars apart,” Reid said, sounding exasperated. “This is absolutely senseless that the Speaker’s doing what he’s doing.”
“These are gyrations I’ve never seen before,” he concluded.