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So, Congressman, first of all, it seems like we are at a gridlock position here. No one seems to be budging.

What can you do to convince either the Democrats or the folks on the other aisle -- across the aisle to move this thing forward and avoid a tax increase?

REP. STENY HOYER (D-MD), MINORITY WHIP: Well, Suzanne, what we're trying to do is say, look, the American people -- and we just heard some spokesmen for them saying, look, why can't they work together? Why can't they come to an agreement? Well, that's exactly what happened in the United States Senate.

They didn't like the House bill. As a matter of fact, Harry Reid tried to put the House bill that the House members are talking about on the floor and the Republicans objected. So what they did was, in consultation with John Boehner, came to an agreement.

MALVEAUX: Right.

HOYER: That agreement had 89 senators out of 100 agree on a proposition that would continue the middle class tax cut, would give certainty and assurance that as of January 1st, there wouldn't be a tax cut, give 48 million Americans assurance that they would still have access to their Medicare doctors, and give 2.3 million Americans an assurance that they wouldn't lose their unemployment insurance, and therefore their ability to support themselves and their families.

MALVEAUX: So, at this point --

HOYER: That's what we can do. That's what we're urging us to do.

MALVEAUX: At this point, having known -- we actually know how we got to this point.

HOYER: Right.

MALVEAUX: What do we do now? How do we move this thing forward? Because, clearly, we're at a gridlock here.

So do you have new ideas or new suggestions?

HOYER: Suzanne, when you say we're at gridlock, the Senate overwhelmingly agreed and McConnell said this was designed to pass. Very frankly, the House bill was designed to fail, we know that.

The president said he wouldn't sign it. The Senate said they wouldn't pass it. They passed it over to the Senate anyway knowing full well that that would put us in this position.

The way to get beyond this is to simply say, OK, we apparently -- at least we articulate that we all agree there ought to be a year extension. But in the short term, because we have not yet reached agreement, let's pass the Senate bill, give assurance for the next 60 days that the present position will stay in place -- that's not hard to do -- and work for the next 60 days, and hopefully we can get that done in 30 days perhaps, that which we've been unable to do so far, come to an agreement on a year's extension, the payroll tax, the unemployment insurance, and other matters that we need to deal with, including paying doctors to take Medicare patients' appropriate sums.

So, we need to do all three of those. We can do it easily.

All we need to do is pass the Senate-passed agreement, passed by the overwhelming majority of United States senators. Eighty-three percent of the Republican senators, 90 percent of the Democratic senators agreed on this proposition. The Tea Party faction, however, of the Republican conference rejected John Boehner's recommendation that they do this.

MALVEAUX: Right. Right. So is there anything --

HOYER: And so what we're trying to convince them of is, let's move forward. Let's do this.

MALVEAUX: Right. Are you optimistic? Because your Republican colleagues say they are not going to support you on the House side. I understand what happened on the Senate side, but we're talking about the House, obviously. They say they are not going to go along.

Is there any reason to be optimistic that they will vote in favor of this?

HOYER: Suzanne, if we see this continuing convulsion, as I call it, of opposition of confrontation and of a refusal to come to compromise, I'm not optimistic. And I think that's tragic for the 160 million Americans that will be affected in terms of their taxes and of the people on Medicare and the unemployed, who will be adversely affected.

So I hope the Republicans come to their sense and say, yes, we've done this before. For instance, we pass a continuing resolution when we can't agree on funding levels. We pass that for a short period of time so that we can try to come to agreement, and often we do in fact come to an agreement.

That's all we're asking today. We think that's a reasonable thing to do. Six Republican United States senators are urging the House members to do just that. Harry Reid has indicated --

MALVEAUX: OK.

HOYER: -- in order -- and here's the -- in order to do what the Republicans want to do, you have to have three cloture votes. Each one of those cloture votes requires 30 hours of debate. So, as a practical matter, we have seen the United States Senate unable to come to grips with that. Now we see them having reached an agreement. We ought to take yes for an answer.

MALVEAUX: All right, Congressman.

HOYER: We ought to move forward and we ought to continue to do the people's business in a constructive, positive way.

MALVEAUX: Well, we're going to have to leave it there. We certainly hope that this is resolved, averting a tax increase for so many Americans during this holiday season.

Appreciate your time.

HOYER: Thank you.

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