As the budget deal gets hammered out, Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is not in the room--and that's okay with him, he told Jansing & Co. Friday. According to reports, President Obama and Speaker Boehner are taking it upon themselves to craft a budget deal without Senate leaders or Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. "I’m not disturbed by the fact that now we have the Speaker and the President sitting down together, or talking over the phone together,“ Schiff said. "I think it’s probably the only way we can progress.”
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) expressed an alternate view on the Senate floor Thursday. “We all know what the plan is, what the scheme is, what the strategy is," Sessions said. "It is to be meeting in secret and then plop down on the floor of the Senate at the last hour [for] some sort of coerced agreement that all the Senators like lemmings are supposed to vote for.”
Schiff disagreed on Jansing & Co. “You can’t have 500 people in the room negotiating an agreement. There is just no way that could possibly succeed," he said. "So yes, we have our leadership, they sit down with the president, they hammer out a deal, they come back to us. Our opportunity for input in this process is with our leadership."
Schiff reiterated that Democrats are drawing the line at Social Security in talks of cutting spending and reforming entitlement programs. "It did not contribute to the deficit and the debt so I don't think there will be any appetite whatsoever for touching Social Security" among Democrats, Schiff said.