Will lawmakers have to abide by the across-the-board spending reductions laid out in the debt-limit deal?
The supercommittee has failed, but President Obama is standing by the deal he made in August.
"My message to them is simple: No," Obama said during a brief televised speech on Wednesday, making it clear that lawmakers will be disappointed if they hope to simply avoid the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts triggered by the deficit supercommittee's failure to agree on a plan.
"I will veto any effort to get rid of those spending cuts," the president said.
What's less clear is how, specifically, Congress's deficit-reduction process will now unfold -- and Obama seemed to leave some room for the legislature to avoid the consequences he pledged to enforce.
Leaders of the deficit supercommittee announced on Monday that they had failed to agree on a plan to cut spending by $1.2 trillion over 10 years and that the panel would not meet its Nov. 23 deadline to avoid the triggering of automatic, across-the-board cuts -- half from defense, and half from non-defense domestic spending. According to the Budget Control Act, which created the supercommittee as part of a deal to raise the federal debt limit in August, that panel would have to propose a plan by Nov. 23 and Congress would have to pass it by Dec. 23, otherwise those cuts would take effect.