Rep. Chris Gibson (R-NY) “came up with what might be the most creative excuse yet” for breaking his pledge not to raise taxes, Politicker reports.

Gibson says “his district number changed from 19 to 20 during this year’s redistricting process and he reasoned that the pledge no longer applies to him as it was only to the constituents under the previous district number.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said there had been “no substantive progress” in fiscal cliff negotiations in the two weeks since congressional leaders met with President Obama, The Hill reports.

Said Boehner: “Despite claims that the president supports a balanced approach, the Democrats have yet to get serious about real spending cuts. Secondly, no substantive progress has been made in the talks between the White House and the House in the last two weeks.”

Mark Halperin: “The most important thing to remember about White House-Hill budget
negotiations is that a deal among the leaders and the President won’t
necessarily have the votes to pass the House.”

Despite the bluster from both sides, Politico says the contours of a tax and spending deal are starting to take shape.

“Cut through the fog, and here’s what to expect: Taxes will go up just shy of $1.2 trillion — the middle ground of what President Barack Obama wants and what Republicans say they could stomach. Entitlement programs, mainly Medicare, will be cut by no less than $400 billion – and perhaps a lot more, to get Republicans to swallow those tax hikes. There will be at least $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and ‘war savings.’ And any final deal will come not by a group effort but in a private deal between two men: Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). The two men had what one insider described as a short, curt conversation Wednesday night — but the private lines of communications remain very much open.”

However Reuters reports Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will meet with Congressional leaders today “amid signs that the market-rattling uncertainty about the outcome could go down to the wire.”

David Frum: “Democrats have some inherent advantages in the impending fiscal
negotiations, but they are mercilessly exploiting one advantage they do
not deserve at all: their claim that they wish only to raise the top
rate of income tax to 1990s levels. That’s true for 2013. But in 2014,
the taxes in Obamacare bite. With those surtaxes, the top rate of tax
will rise beyond the Clinton levels to levels not seen since before the
tax reform of 1986. That’s a point that deserves repetition and
underscoring, again and again.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and other top Republicans “shot down a proposal by a senior GOP lawmaker that the House agree to President Obama’s demand to extend current tax rates for the middle class,” The Hill reports.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), “a respected party strategist and former chairman of the House GOP campaign committee, became the most prominent House Republican to suggest that the GOP do what has long been unthinkable within the party: lock in the George W. Bush-era tax rates for income up to $250,000 without simultaneously extending them for top earners.”

Said Boehner: “We’re not going to grow the economy if we raise tax rates on the top two rates. It’ll hurt small businesses. It’ll hurt our economy. That’s why it’s not the right approach. We’ll willing to put revenue on the table as long as we’re not raising rates.”

First Read notes the current negotiations over avoiding the “fiscal cliff” essentially amounts “to running in
circles, because the real negotiations won’t take place until
mid-to-late December. The reason: Washington typically needs hard
deadlines to force members to act. But there is something quite
significant that’s going on during this running-in-circles period.
Republicans and Democrats are beginning to prepare their own bases for
what the deal will ultimately look like.”

National Journal:
“The Kumbaya rhetoric and photo-ops between President Obama and
congressional leaders surrounding the so-called fiscal cliff are
starting to wear thin. … For all of the optimism surrounding the initial
meetings between leaders, very little progress has been made….”

Politico:
“This is the public relations phase of the latest fiscal showdown in
Washington, where direct engagement is no longer viewed as the optimal
route to reaching a deal. As Wall Street shudders and Congress once
again risks looking feckless in the face of crisis, both sides are
locked in a battle to win over key interest groups — and the public.”

Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) urged colleagues in a private session “to vote to extend the Bush tax rates for all but the highest earners before the end of the year — and to battle over the rest later,” Politico reports.

The conservative Republican said that he believes such a vote would not violate Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge and that he’s not alone within Republican circles. He also said it would “rob the president of the argument that Republicans are holding up tax cuts for all but the top earners.”

Said Cole: “I think we ought to take the 98 percent deal right now. It doesn’t mean I agree with raising the top 2. I don’t.”

Wonk Wire: For fiscal cliff deal, the devil is in the details.

ABC News has a good backgrounder on Grover Norquist’s tax pledge, the short document which looms large over the fiscal cliff negotiations.

“Known in Republican circles simply as ‘The Pledge,’ the Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) Taxpayer Protection Pledge has steered GOP tax policy for decades, applying pressure to any candidate, lawmaker, or president who would raise taxes. If tax rates aren’t at stake, the pledge is equally unforgiving to those who would limit deductions, even as a tradeoff, as Republicans are now being asked to do by Democrats and President Obama.”

The Week: Will Republicans regret it if they dump Grover Norquist?

President Obama “plans to try to ratchet up public pressure on Congress to accept his ideas for resolving the looming tax-and-spending crisis with a series of events at the White House and on the road this week,” the New York Times reports.

First Read: “While Team Obama is beginning to increase its activity as we get closer to the fiscal cliff deadline at the end of the year — we learned yesterday that Obama chatted over the phone with House Speaker John Boehner on Saturday (along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) — the reality is that everyone is going to run in circles over the next couple of weeks. Why? Because Washington typically needs the pressure of a deadline to get things done. There’s more of a chance for getting a deal in mid to late December. That’s just the nature of how this process works. And by the way, it’s what the negotiators themselves know. All of them have privately expressed an interest to hit the fast forward button on the DVR and simply get to the end game.”

The Economist: “The door is open to a deal; the hard part is walking through it.”

Private talks between President Obama and top congressional leaders in search of a deal to avoid the year-end “fiscal cliff” are accelerating, the Washington Post reports.

Obama telephoned House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) over the weekend, “in a sign that high-level negotiations are advancing with only weeks to go before an automatic series of spending cuts and tax hikes starts to hit nearly every American.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports Obama “is ramping up the White House’s postelection effort to generate public support for his preferred package of tax increases and spending cuts.”

The Economist: “By any standard other than the absurdly high one he has set himself,
though, Mr Norquist continues to dominate Washington’s tax debate.
Almost all revenue-raising proposals hinge on eliminating deductions,
rather than raising marginal rates. If Mr Obama does succeed in raising
the income-tax rate for the richest, it will have taken him two
elections and all manner of fiscal face-offs and crises to get his
way–and success is still far from assured. Even scrapping an
economically nonsensical subsidy for ethanol, it seems, is still a
highly controversial move. Grover is not over yet.”

BuzzFeed: Four reasons not to count Grover Norquist out.

David Corn says the idea that President Obama “caved in” on the Bush tax cuts in 2010 is a myth.

“Obama didn’t wave the white flag in 2010. He turned a face-off over the Bush tax cuts into an opportunity to enact a second stimulus that he otherwise could not get past Senate Republicans. His failure at that time was not that he mustered insufficient mettle; he failed to convey to the world that he had ju-jitsued the GOPers.”

“I’m not obligated on the pledge. I made Tennesseans aware, I was just elected, the only thing I’m honoring is the oath I take when I serve, when I’m sworn in this January.”

— Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), quoted by the Washington Post, becoming the latest GOP lawmaker to buck the anti-tax pledge.

“Grover Norquist is an impediment to good governing and… the only good thing about Grover Norquist is he’s named after a character from Sesame Street.”

— Former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd, quoted by ABC News, on the anti-tax crusader.

Wonk Wire: Norquist tax pledge begins to crumble.

A new CNN/ORC poll finds 53% of the country has an unfavorable view of the Republican Party and only 42% want to see congressional Republican have more influence than the president over the direction the nation takes in the next two years. And seven in ten say the GOP has not done enough to cooperate with Obama.

All of that helps explain why more Americans would blame the Republicans in Congress rather than Obama if the fiscal cliff provisions actually go into effect next year, 45% to 34%.

“I will violate the pledge, long story short, for the good of the country, only if Democrats will do entitlement reform.”

— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), in an interview on ABC News, on his willingness to break his pledge not to raise taxes.

As Congress faces negotiations about averting the “fiscal cliff,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) told WMAZ-TV that he’s not willing to be bound by the anti-tax pledge he once signed.

Said Chambliss: “I care more about my country than I do about a 20-year-old pledge.”

When asked if he thought anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist would hold it against him during his next re-election bid in 2014, he said he probably would.

“But I don’t worry about that because I care too much about my country. I care a lot more about it than I do Grover Norquist.”

Wonk Wire has the details of an emerging framework for compromise.