Hours before Republicans in the House shot down Speaker John Boehner’s proposed ‘Plan B’ solution to the fiscal cliff , FreedomWorks urged its members to contact members of Congress and tell them not to vote for it.
Boehner had already been taking heat all week, according to the Washington Times, because he was not negotiating a deal that met the conservative advocacy group’s desires that every dollar in new revenue be matched by a dollar in spending cuts.
Several groups, including FreedomWorks, also were unhappy that another increase in the debt ceiling was rumored to be part of the negotiations to avoid the fiscal cliff.
“Once again, the Republican establishment is negotiating with itself,” Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, said in a press release Thursday afternoon. “The $16 trillion monstrosity that is our current national debt is a product of spending too much, not taxing too little. Until a plan is put on the table that commits Congress to at least finding the promised $1.2 trillion in sequester savings, anything else can be considered ‘Plan J,’ for joke.”
Boehner’s ‘Plan B’ proposal included cuts to several entitlement programs, including Meals on Wheels and the federal food stamp program, and cut taxes for Americans earning less than $1 million a year.
FreedomWorks said it expected Boehner would find a way to cut $1.2 trillion from the federal budget, but without decimating the Pentagon budget and while still extending the current tax rates for at least one year.
“Replacing the sequester does not count as a concession Speaker Boehner can claim that he extracted from the president as far as we are concerned,” said Barney Keller, spokesman for the Club for Growth. “Those are spending cuts that were going to happen anyway... Certainly, if all you are doing is replacing the sequester, which is already in law, then all you are really doing is giving the president a clean debt-limit increase.”
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