U.S. Speaker John Boehner said the
House can’t pass an increase to the U.S. debt ceiling without
packaging it with other provisions -- something President Barack Obama has labeled a nonstarter.
“We are not going to pass a clean debt limit,” Boehner
said yesterday in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” program.
“The votes are not in the House to pass a clean debt limit.” Boehner said he believed the country could end up in default if Obama doesn’t negotiate. “That’s the path we’re on,” he said.
Boehner’s comments came as the stalemate between the White House and House Republicans showed little sign of thawing just 10 days from when Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew told lawmakers the U.S. will exhaust measures to avoid breaching the debt ceiling. The House and Senate weren’t in session yesterday and there were no meetings planned between the two sides.
The Obama administration has said it won’t negotiate with Republicans over funding the government or raising the debt ceiling, arguing that it is part of the basic functions of Congress and shouldn’t be used as points of leverage.
Obama, in an interview with the Associated Press, said he expects Congress will reach an agreement to raise the nation’s $16.7 trillion debt limit in time to avert a default.
“The nation’s credit is at risk because of the administration’s refusal to sit down and have a conversation,” Boehner said. Asked if he’d consider putting a clean debt ceiling increase on the floor, Boehner said the House would not be “going down that path.”
Hard Line
Boehner said on ABC he doesn’t intend to let the government default and he has told his members the same thing behind closed doors, even if it involves using Democratic votes, according to aides and lawmakers.Still, the speaker has stuck to a hard line as he works to keep the Republicans unified and extract concessions from Obama. So far, that approach hasn’t yielded any talks with Obama or movement toward heading off a default.
“We’re not going to resolve this without the president engaging in it,” Texas Senator John Cornyn, the second-ranked Republican in the chamber, said yesterday in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Now the debt ceiling and the continuing resolution have sort of morphed into one another because of the timing of this thing.”
Administration Position
Lew, who made appearances yesterday on four of the major Sunday television talk shows, said the administration would only be willing to negotiate after the partial shutdown, now in its sixth day, comes to an end and the debt ceiling is increased. He also warned of the dangers of default, as well as the possibility that Congress may actually fail to pass an increase.“I’ve talked with John Boehner; I know he doesn’t want to default,” Lew said on “Fox News Sunday.” “He also didn’t want to shut the government down. And here we are with a government shutdown.”
The U.S. will run out of borrowing authority on Oct. 17 and will have about $30 billion in cash after that. The country would be unable to pay all of its bills, including benefits, salaries and interest, sometime between Oct. 22 and Oct. 31, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
‘Playing With Fire’
“Congress is playing with fire,” Lew said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “If the United States government, for the first time in its history, chooses not to pay its bills on time, we will be in default, there is no option that prevents us from being in default if we don’t have enough cash to pay our bills.”Unlike past fiscal feuds, this dispute is more about Obama’s Affordable Care Act, his signature health-care law, and less about the amount of spending. The U.S. budget deficit in June was 4.3 percent of gross domestic product, down from 10.1 percent in February 2010 and the narrowest since November 2008, when Obama was elected to his first term, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the Treasury Department and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
So far, the financial-market response to the political gridlock has been muted. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index climbed 0.7 percent in New York Oct. 4. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury increased two basis points last week, trading between 2.66 percent and 2.58 percent.
While the yield is up from the record low of 1.38 percent in July 2012, it’s below the average of about 6.7 percent since the early 1980s, the start of the three-decade long bull market in bonds.
Read More : http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-10-06/boehner-says-he-doesn-t-have-votes-to-increase-debt-limit-1
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