Onetime Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin apologized for calling some GOP lawmakers “wusses” in their negotiations with Democrats regarding the “fiscal cliff.”
“Well, I guess I shouldn’t call politicians names, so I apologize for calling the wobbly ones 'wusses,' ” the former Alaska governor told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Monday night. “Because that distracts from the point that has to be made, and the point is that we are a bankrupt country."
House Republican leaders are already facing backlash for a counteroffer made to President Obama in the deficit talks, with two high-profile conservative groups lashing out Monday, saying the GOP had caved on taxes.
Lawmakers are negotiating a deficit-reduction package to avoid the combination of expiring tax rates and automatic spending cuts set to take effect in January.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Monday presented a counteroffer to President Obama's original proposal. The House GOP plan calls for $2.2 trillion in deficit reduction with a combination of spending cuts, entitlement reforms and $800 billion in new tax revenues.
“Republicans were reelected in the House to stop President Obama's agenda, not figure out creative ways to fund it,” Dan Holler, communications director for Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told The Hill in an email.
And Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group partially funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, said the GOP offer “left conservatives wanting.”
Palin on Monday said Republicans needed to return to their fiscally conservative roots, and sounded her familiar refrain of calling Obama a socialist — but this time warned that communism might be in the U.S.’s future.
“So I say, Republicans, go back to what the planks in your platform represent,” she continued on Monday. “It represents reining in government, putting back the power and the responsibility in the individual, not in the state, not in government. Again, that gets us towards socialism. What goes beyond socialism ... is communism. I know I’m going to get slammed for speaking so bluntly about what’s going on here, but that’s exactly what is going on.”
Palin also said Republicans should not cede power to the White House to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling.
“A very scary proposal was recently revealed by Geithner essentially saying, ‘Let the president have free rein on raising the debt ceiling to whatever level he wants it.’ That’s a very scary thought, because Barack Obama is a socialist.”
