‘’Small news of today : More than 300,000 civilian defense department
employees are back on the job after being recalled, but the president is urging
Republicans to pass a budget extension without any amendments to avoid the
government reaching the debt ceiling deadline Oct. 17.
By : NBC's Peter Alexander reports.’’
‘’Top Talkers: The House does have the votes to pass a clean CR, Joe Scarborough asserts despite House Speaker Boehner's comments suggesting otherwise. Which begs the question: Will all of this go to the debt ceiling and beyond? And if it does, how hard is the Oct. 17 deadline date? The Morning Joe panel -- including Jeremy Peters, David Ignatius, Harold Ford Jr. and Steve Rattner -- discusses.’’
So, let’s know what’s up…
With the federal government’s shutdown nearing its second week, Democrats
dared House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to prove his claims that he didn’t
have the votes on a continuing resolution to re-open the government or raise
the debt limit without concessions from President Barack Obama.
As lawmakers returned to work in Washington, the Republican speaker’s
assertions took center stage.
“There are not the
votes in the House to pass a clean CR,” Boehner said in an interview on ABC
Sunday, despite informal whip counts collected by NBC News and other outlets
suggesting that as many as 22 House Republicans could join with Democrats to
pass a simple extension of spending that would reopen the federal government.
But the funding fight appears poised to bleed into the Oct. 17 deadline by which lawmakers must authorize more borrowing to finance existing spending, or risk defaulting on the national debt.
"We're not going to pass a clean debt-limit increase," Boehner said of that deadline. "I told the president, there's no way we're going to pass one. The votes are not in the House to pass a clean debt limit. And the president is risking default by not having a conversation with us."
In short, Republicans in Congress appeared no closer to resolving their fiscal differences with Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress. But wrapping the debt ceiling into the impasse only raises the stakes for the impasse’s outcome.
Democrats – who have demanded a clean extension of both government spending
and the debt limit – have demanded that Boehner move to approve those measures
as a precondition of broader negotiations over government spending.
And so the second week of the shutdown essentially opened with Democrats
calling Boehner’s bluff.
“If there are not votes to open the government as Speaker Boehner says, why
is he so afraid to call the vote and prove it?” White House senior adviser Dan
Pfeiffer asked Monday morning on Twitter.
The president himself, though, was scheduled to stay out of the public eye
after waging a PR blitz against Republicans for much of last week.
But as the shutdown appeared ready to extend into its second week – and
perhaps longer – it was clear that something would have to give in the next 10
days, or risk a severe blow to seriously harm an already-shaky American
financial system, and threated to plunge the United States back into recession.
Republican leaders suggested that another weekend of work could be in the
cards, especially as the debt ceiling deadline neared.
The first seven days of the shutdown were more full of
political posturing and blame-placing than sincere negotiations to
restart the government.
Thousands of government programs remain on hold, and most services have
been reduced to bare-boned staff. National parks are shuttered, and hundreds of
thousands of government workers have been ordered to stay home.
One bipartisan breakthrough came over the weekend after the White House and
Senate Democrats agreed to legislation from the House GOP guaranteeing back pay
for furloughed federal workers.
J. Scott Applewhite / APHouse
Speaker John Boehner of Ohio arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday,
Oct. 7, 2013.
That bill, though, was only one of the handful of limited spending bills
proposed by Republicans to reinstate funding for some of the most visible
consequences of the shutdown, like children's cancer research on hold or the
officially-closed World War II memorial.
Democrats have argued for days that the surest way to ensure all of those
programs would be for the House to finally vote to approve the simple, six-week
extension of government spending favored by Obama and his Democratic allies.
And though there are emerging signs of bipartisan support for such a
measure, Republicans' insistence on passing a series of messaging-oriented
bills suggested that the GOP was locked into its position for the long haul.
Most prognosticators agree that one side will eventually blink, and not
allow the U.S. to default. But Boehner and Obama have each built such immense
political stakes into this standoff's outcome that at least one of them will
suffer greatly from the eventual resolution.
How that resolution might play out appeared to even bewilder Boehner, who
responded when asked when the shutdown fight would conclude: “If I knew, I
would tell you.”
This story was originally published on Mon Oct 7, 2013
11:49 AM EDT
By Michael O'Brien, Political Reporter, NBC News
Modified by Turbes Languidoc –Badr-
Explore related topics: congress, shutdown, capitol-hill, barack-obama, featured, john-boehner, updated, appfeatured
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