Boehner says House won’t OK ‘clean’ bill

Democrats say votes there if speaker puts it on floor

Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, arrives at the Capitol in Washington, Saturday, Oct. 5, 2013. The Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate are at an impasse, neither side backing down, after House GOP conservatives linked the funding bill to President Obama's existent health care law. There has been no sign of progress toward ending the government shutdown that has idled 800,000 federal workers and curbed services around the country.  (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, arrives at the Capitol in Washington, Saturday, Oct. 5, 2013. The Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate are at an impasse, neither side backing down, after House GOP conservatives linked the funding bill to President Obama's existent health care law. There has been no sign of progress toward ending the government shutdown that has idled 800,000 federal workers and curbed services around the country. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Monday, October 7, 2013

WASHINGTON - House Speaker John Boehner stood his ground Sunday, insisting that his Republican House majority would not pass measures either to fund and reopen the entire federal government or to increase the nation’s soon-to-be-breached borrowing limit without concessions from President Barack Obama.

“There are not the votes in the House to pass a clean CR,” Boehner said on the ABC News program This Week, referring to a continuing resolution that would provide stopgap funding and end the government shutdown.

For the Obama administration, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who is the president’s chief financial officer, appeared on four television shows Sunday to keep the pressure on House Republicans to pass a measure to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.

Some Democrats and moderate Republicans in the House have said that together their votes would be enough to pass a spending measure necessary to reopen the government with no conditions attached. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a Senate Democratic leader who followed Boehner on ABC, quickly countered: “Let me issue him a friendly challenge: Put it on the floor [today] or Tuesday. I would bet there are the votes to pass it.”

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., expressed similar sentiments.

“I’m positive that a clean CR would pass,” King said Sunday.

“If it went on the floor tomorrow, I could see anywhere from 50 to 75 Republicans voting for it,” he added. “And if it were a secret ballot, 150.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., released a letter that bears the signatures of 195 of the chamber’s 200 Democrats, all urging Boehner to pass a “clean” continuing resolution.

The five Democrats who did not sign the letter come from the party’s more conservative wing. They are Reps. Ron Kind, of Wisconsin; Jim Cooper of Tennessee; John Barrow of Georgia; Jim Matheson of Utah; and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina.

On the subject of the looming deadline for Congress to increase the debt limit by Oct. 17 to avert a first-ever government default, Boehner seemed to contradict news reports in recent days that he had told Republicans privately that he ultimately would allow a vote to prevent a breach of the debt limit.

“We’re not going to pass a clean debt limit increase,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said.

He added, “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.”

Describing the dialogue he wanted with the president, Boehner seemed to shift from demands that Obama agree to negotiations about defunding or delaying his signature health insurance law - a non-negotiable condition, asthe White House sees it - to calling once again for deficit-reduction talks aimed at reducing spending for fast-growing entitlement programs, chiefly Medicare and Medicaid.

“I’m not going to raise the debt limit without a serious conversation about dealing with problems that are driving the debt up. It would be irresponsible of me to do this,” Boehner said.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a force in pushing Republicans to link changes to the healthcare law in exchange for keeping the government running, also spelled out his conditions for raising the borrowing authority.

“We should look for three things. No. 1, we should look for some significant structural plan to reduce government spending. No. 2, we should avoid new taxes. And No. 3, we should look for ways to mitigate the harms from ‘Obamacare,’” Cruz said on CNN’s State of the Union, describing the debt ceiling issue as one of the “best leverage the Congress has to rein in the executive.”

Obama has said he would negotiate long-term reductions to entitlement programs, including Social Security, and he has proposed some steps, but he says he will support such actions only if Republicans agree to raise additional revenue by closing tax provisions for wealthy individuals and some corporations.

But Boehner ruled that out. “We’re not raising taxes,” he said.

On the immediate issue of the budget impasse that has shuttered much of the government, Boehner acknowledged that in July he had gone to the Senate majority leader, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and offered to have the House pass a “clean” spending measure. That proposal would have set spending levels $70 billion below what Democrats wanted but would have had no controversial add-ons related to the health-care law.

Democrats accepted, but now they say Boehner reneged when a faction of conservative House Republicans rejected the strategy as capitulation on the health insurance program.

The speaker explained, “I and my members decided the threat of Obamacare and what was happening was so important that it was time for us to take a stand. And we took a stand.”

Lew, speaking on CNN, emphatically reiterated the administration’s legal opinion that Obama cannot constitutionally raise the debt ceiling by himself if Congress fails to act.

“There is no option that prevents us from being in default if we’re not paying our bills,” Lew said, rejecting the idea that the president could invoke a constitutional power or take some other action to avert economic chaos if the country breached its debt limit for the first time in history.

Lew, who wrote Congress on Tuesday to say he had used his last “extraordinary measure” to manage federal accounts in ways to buy time, reiterated that the government would most likely have about $30 billion available on Oct. 17.

“And $30 billion is a lot of money, but when you think about the cash flow of the government of the United States, we have individual days when our negative or positive cash flow is $50 or $60 billion,” he said in the CNN interview. “So $30 billion is not a responsible amount of cash to run the government on.”

Since 1789, Lew added, “we’ve never gotten to the point where the United States has operated without the ability to borrow. It’s very dangerous; it’s reckless.”

On CNN and on Fox News Sunday, Lew repeatedly dismissed questions as to why Obama would not negotiate with House Republicans over the debt limit. Obama has said that increasing the borrowing authority is a basic congressional responsibility under the Constitution, and not one for which lawmakers can extract ransom - in this case the demand that he defund or delay his signature healthcare law.

“The president wants to negotiate,” Lew said on Fox. “Congress needs to do its job, and we then need to negotiate.”

The Treasury issued a report on Thursday detailing in stark terms what could happen if the government defaulted on its obligations to service the national debt.

“A default would be unprecedented and has the potential to be catastrophic,” the Treasury report said. “Credit markets could freeze, the value of the dollar could plummet, U.S. interest rates could skyrocket, the negative spillovers could reverberate around the world.”

Private economists generally agree that a default on the U.S. debt would be extremely harmful, especially if the impasse was not resolved quickly.

“If they don’t pay on the debt, that would cost us for generations to come,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. He said a debt default would be a “cataclysmic” event that would roil financial markets in the United States and around the world.

Zandi said that holders of U.S. Treasury bonds would demand higher interest rates, which would cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars in higher interest payments in forthcoming years on the national debt.

Some Republicans, such as Rep. Steve King of Iowa, dismiss the warnings about a government default as an exaggeration, suggesting U.S. credit won’t collapse and calling the talk “a lot of false demagoguery.”

Lew also appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation, and NBC’s Meet the Press.

Information for this article was contributed by Jackie Calmes and Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times; by Aaron Blake of the Washington Post; and by Donna Cassata and Martin Crutsinger of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/07/2013