Public concern over a possible US debt default is mounting as the political impasse continues with President Barack Obama and Republican Speaker John Boehner refusing to budge from their hard-held positions on the question of holding negotiations to find a way out.
At an hour-long news conference on Tuesday, Obama complained of “extortion” by a section of the Republican Party as he set his conditions for talks, essentially sticking to his line that the Republicans should first vote to end the nine-day-old Government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.
Boehner dubbed this a demand for “unconditional surrender” by the Republicans. “That’s not the way our Government works,” the Speaker said, asking the President to begin conversations about spending cuts right now, not next week or next month.
Political observers, however, still believe that a short-term deal would be hammered out as neither party would want to precipitate an American debt default.
They see a positive sign in Obama’s plan to have separate meetings with groups of Democratic and Republicans lawmakers of both chambers, beginning with House Democrats later on Wednesday. Some have called this proposed exercise “a glimmer of hope”.
Obama himself indicated that he would be ready to hold formal negotiations if only the Republicans agreed at least for a short-term raising of the debt ceiling to ward off the immediate crisis.
“If there’s a way to solve this, it has to include reopening the government and saying America’s not going to default, it’s going to pay our bills,” Obama said, adding: “They (the Republicans) can attach some process to that that gives them some certainty that in fact the things they’re concerned about will be topics of negotiation.”
“Everybody should say one of the most valuable things that we have is America’s creditworthiness. This is not something we should even come close to fooling around with,” he said, telling the Republicans: “If Congress refuses to raise what’s called the debt ceiling, America would not be able to meet all of our financial obligations for the first time in 225 years.” That, he quoted economists and CEOs as saying, would be “insane,” “catastrophic,” “chaos”.
Boehner dismissed Obama’s position on the fiscal crisis as “not sustainable”. “It’s time for us to just sit down and resolve our differences,” Boehner said. “There’s no boundaries here. There’s nothing on the table, there’s nothing off the table.”
Obama also phoned Boehner on Tuesday to urge him to allow a House vote on a budget bill without conditions. But the Speaker asked him to open negotiations. “I will say it was a pleasant conversation, although I have to say I was disappointed that the President refuses to negotiate,” Boehner commented later.
lawmakers in the Senate and the House of Representatives were busy with their own moves to deal with the crisis in what was being viewed largely as an exercise in futility.
House Republicans passed a legislation to create a 20-member bipartisan “working group” to end the shutdown and raise the debt limit while going into the various funding issues.
It was voted 224 to 197, with most Democrats voting no. And Democrats, who hold the majority in the Senate, were dismissive of the whole idea.
The Senate Democrats, for their part, introduced a bill to suspend enforcement of the debt limit till the end of 2014. It remained to be seen if the Republicans thwart the measure with a filibuster. The Democrats, with 54 members in the 100-member Senate, will need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.