Post date: Jan 03, 2013 9:31:41 PM
The 113th Congress convenes for first session of the year
WASHINGTON, D.C., UNITED STATES (JANUARY 3, 2012) (SENATE TV) - The new 113th U.S. Congress convened Thursday (January 3) with a record number of women being sworn in as members of the Congress as a result of elections last November 6.
The 80 women members of the House of Representatives are joining a total of 20 female senators - a record crop for both chambers, which have been dominated by men - white men - from the time the first U.S. Congress was seated in 1789.The 100 women of the 113th U.S. Congress - out of 535 members - will be thrown into a pressure cooker with huge fights already brewing over reducing federal budget deficits, imposing new controls on gun ownership and reforming badly outdated immigration laws and the tax code.
The White House and Congress managed to cut a deal on the "fiscal cliff" by agreeing to a two-month delay to sequestration - automatic spending cuts that were set to take effect on January 1.
Obama and lawmakers now have until March 1 to reach agreement on about $85 billion in spending reductions. If they do not, they will see across-the-board ones kick in, about evenly split between military and domestic programs.
Obama and Congress likely have until the end of February to raise the U.S. debt limit, now at $16.4 trillion.
Failure to do so would result in an unprecedented U.S. default, a move likely to rattle financial markets worldwide.
Obama says he will refuse to allow the debt limit to become a political bargaining tool again.
But Republicans do not seem be willing to raise it without extracting major spending cuts, mostly from government programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
"Four straight years of trillion dollar deficits and projected spending that no realistic amount of tax revenue could cover have put us at a crossroads. Either we tackle our nation's spending problem or it's going to tackle us. It's that simple. And there is no better time to do the work we need to do than right now," said Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, the top ranking Republican in the Senate.
"We all know in our hearts it's wrong to pass on this debt onto our kids and our grandkids, now we have to be willing, truly willing to make this problem right," said Speaker of the House John Boehner, Republican of Ohio.
The previous Congress has been widely criticized for partisan bickering and being bitterly divided. The top Democrat in the Senate acknowledge the problems of the 112thCongress.
"Unfortunately we showed that we had some political differences and these differences prevented us from accomplishing as much as we had hoped from the Congress that was just completed," Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said.
The 113th Congress begins with a little more optimism, partly led by Senator Mark Kirk, the Republican from Illinois, who suffered a debilitating stroke on January 21, 2012 which left him having to learn how to walk again. His arrival on the Capitol steps for the first time in a year was greeted applause from his fellow Senators.