Rep. Coffman defends debt-ceiling vote, says GOP must govern

The Aug. 1 vote to raise the federal debt ceiling split Republicans 174-66. Many Republicans who voted against the agreement to cut $1 trillion over 10 years and start a process for finding another $1.5 trillion in additional cuts said the deal didn’t go far enough, as it mostly curbed planned federal spending increases rather than made actual cuts to current spending levels.

But Coffman said House Republicans got the best deal they could get given that the Senate and White House are controlled by Democrats. He also said Republican support for the deal helped maximize the spending cuts that could be achieved, and said this is why Republican support for the deal was critical.

{mosads}”For every Republican vote we lose and have to go across the aisle to get a Democrat vote, the [spending reduction] numbers go down,” he said. “Is it the best deal we could have got? I think it is, because we are deadlocked.”

Coffman assured Republicans that he and most other members of his party would reject tax increases, and said Democrats continue to reject entitlement reforms. For these reasons, Coffman said he thinks this deadlock will be broken in the 2012 election, which could give Senate Republicans enough seats to control that chamber.

Republicans are also hoping to replace President Obama with a Republican president. Coffman criticized Obama in Colorado by saying he is pursuing government stimulus programs that haven’t worked. He said Obama seems to have concluded that “FDR didn’t spend enough” during the Great Depression, and said the president should be mirroring Ronald Reagan, who cut taxes in the early 1980s that have been credited with allowing economic growth in the U.S. to resume.