The clock was ticking yesterday for Republicans and Democrats to come up with a deal to avert a US federal government shutdown at midnight yesterday after US President Barack Obama failed to resolve the impasse.
With Obama’s order ringing in their ears, negotiators from both sides worked through a second straight night in search of a spending plan to fund the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30 — to be approved by the US Senate and the US House of Representatives.
Obama’s second consecutive late-night summit with Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid failed to clinch a deal in a budget row that has turned into a tussle for political primacy in divided Washington.
The president showed a glint of optimism that negotiations could be wrapped up yesterday, allowing him to put the machinery already beginning to shutter the vast federal bureaucracy into reverse.
“My hope is that I will be able to announce to the American people sometime relatively early in the day that a shutdown has been averted, that a deal has been completed,” Obama said.
However, the president cautioned he was not yet “wildly optimistic.”
Should last-ditch efforts fail, about 800,000 federal employees would be temporarily laid off, frontline combat soldiers would miss paychecks and even the BlackBerry smartphones of government officials would go dark.
However, deep political uncertainty is clouding the endgame of the crisis even if a deal is reached, with Boehner in an especially precarious political position.
The speaker would have to sell the agreement to ultra--conservative members of his coalition, elected on a Tea Party platform of massive spending cuts and outright confrontation with the Democratic president.
“The remaining issues are -extremely, extremely narrow,” Reid said after returning from Thursday’s late-night talks at the White House. “I’m not really confident, but I’m very, very hopeful.”
Boehner joined Reid in a statement saying “we have narrowed the issues” and vowing to “continue to work through the night to attempt to resolve our remaining differences.”
After the meeting, Obama canceled a planned trip to Indiana to stay in Washington and see the final push to the end.
Reflecting his own party’s hard line on spending, Boehner said earlier that “we each have policy provisions we feel strongly about. We have spending that we feel strongly about.”
Republicans disputed Democratic claims that a breakthrough — needed to avert the shutdown — had stalled on anti-abortion measures attached to a spending blueprint passed by the House six weeks ago.
The White House declined to detail remaining issues, but Obama has said he would not back down on Republican attempts to curtail spending on education, environmental rules and medical procedures.
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs official yesterday said that a delegation that visited China for an APEC meeting did not receive any kind of treatment that downgraded Taiwan’s sovereignty. Department of International Organizations Director-General Jonathan Sun (孫儉元) said that he and a group of ministry officials visited Shenzhen, China, to attend the APEC Informal Senior Officials’ Meeting last month. The trip went “smoothly and safely” for all Taiwanese delegates, as the Chinese side arranged the trip in accordance with long-standing practices, Sun said at the ministry’s weekly briefing. The Taiwanese group did not encounter any political suppression, he said. Sun made the remarks when
The Taiwanese passport ranked 33rd in a global listing of passports by convenience this month, rising three places from last month’s ranking, but matching its position in January last year. The Henley Passport Index, an international ranking of passports by the number of designations its holder can travel to without a visa, showed that the Taiwan passport enables holders to travel to 139 countries and territories without a visa. Singapore’s passport was ranked the most powerful with visa-free access to 192 destinations out of 227, according to the index published on Tuesday by UK-based migration investment consultancy firm Henley and Partners. Japan’s and
BROAD AGREEMENT: The two are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff to 15% and a commitment for TSMC to build five more fabs, a ‘New York Times’ report said Taiwan and the US have reached a broad consensus on a trade deal, the Executive Yuan’s Office of Trade Negotiations said yesterday, after a report said that Washington is set to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent. The New York Times on Monday reported that the two nations are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent and commit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to building at least five more facilities in the US. “The agreement, which has been under negotiation for months, is being legally scrubbed and could be announced this month,” the paper said,
RSS