City | 8:24 pm | December 12, 2012 | By

Lieberman may swing vote on fiscal cliff

Joe_Lieberman_official_portrait
Photo by Tom/Creative Commons.

A month shy of his retirement after four terms in office, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman ’64 LAW ’67 may represent a swing vote on legislation that would deter the upcoming “fiscal cliff,” which is expected to go into effect next January.

The Democratic senator said in a Monday press conference that his vote depends on the results of talks between President Barack Obama and Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner. Lieberman told reporters that negotiations “are a very top-down process,” and expressed that Congress is charged with “a lot to do in three weeks.”

“President Obama and Speaker Boehner are both in strong positions within their own parties and among the members of their own caucuses in Congress,” Lieberman said in the release. “If they agree on something, I believe we will adopt it.”

The White House released a second offer yesterday, which would require Congress to generate $1.4 trillion in new revenue, but House Republicans found the proposal unsatisfactory, according to CBS News.

The fiscal cliff would result in higher taxes and spending cuts in areas such as defense and Medicare that were passed in the debt ceiling deal of 2011, which analysts fear would plunge the economy into another recession.

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