There are two red lines for the president, it appears, on the fiscal cliff. The first is that the top tax rate has to go up. The second is that the debt ceiling be taken off the table as a political weapon:
During a Wednesday morning meeting with business leaders, Obama was blunt: “I want to send a very clear message to people here. We are not going to play that game next year. If Congress in any way suggests that they’re going to tie negotiations to debt ceiling votes and take us to the brink of default once again as part of a budget negotiation, which, by the way, we have never done in our history until we did it last year, I will not play that game.”
And Obama and Geithner are citing what they have called “The McConnell Provision” after it was proposed by the Republican Senate Minority Leader in 2011. See the chart above and the Treasury post here. Obama and Geithner are acting as if they were Republicans who had just gotten re-elected. They are acting as if they have a mandate to roll back the extremism of the GOP, and prevent it from threatening another self-induced credit crisis. Imagine that.
The Dish 