MANVILLE: Reluctantly, Rep. Holt votes for fiscal cliff bill

    With what he said was “great reluctance,” Congressman Rush Holt voted for the so-called fiscal cliff compromise on New Year’s Night.
    The House of Representatives majority carried the bill, 267-157, to support the same bill the Senate had passed, 89-8, the day before.
    He said the President and Democratic leadership in Congress should never have agreed to negotiate with “hostage takers.”
       “However, I do not want to make the situation worse by weakening the President’s hand and weakening the economy by allowing the government, so to speak, to ‘fall off the cliff,’ so, with great reluctance I will support this bill,” he said in a statement inserted in the Congressional Record.
    “This deal was done wrong,” he wrote. He predicted a kerfuffle of the so-called debt crisis and spending and tax increases in March, and “the President will be in a weaker, not stronger, position to deal with the crisis then.”
    He said he agreed that long -term economic stability and growth requires a greater balance between revenue and expenditures, but that “should always be true, though, not just whenever someone says there is a crisis.”
    The country does have a long-term problem with the debt, he added, and should work to correct it, “but also we should recognize that it is long-term.”
       He said the “fiscal cliff” was the result of a deal agreed to in August 2011 to break a deadlock over raising the nation’s debt ceiling when “some congressional members who dislike government tried to prevent the U.S. from paying our debts.