Talks intensified on reaching a deal on long-overdue legislation to finance the government through the end of September, but Democratic and Republican leaders emerged no closer to an agreement to prevent a partial shutdown of federal operations at midnight tomorrow.
A White House meeting on Tuesday that included US President Barack Obama, Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid failed to produce the hoped-for breakthrough.
A visibly frustrated Obama emerged from the failed negotiation session and declared it would be “inexcusable” to allow “politics and ideology” to force Washington to close many of its doors in a dispute over what amounts to about 12 percent of what the US government spends.
“We are closer than we have ever been to an agreement. There is no reason why we should not get an agreement,” Obama said.
Boehner, meanwhile, denied White House claims that both sides had agreed, before going into the meeting, to cuts of US$33 billion in spending for the rest of the year.
The speaker said Republicans “will not be put in a box” of accepting options they refuse to endorse.
Talks also took place on Tuesday between Boehner and Reid at the Capitol, with both sides reporting a private and productive discussion.
All sides say they don’t want a partial shutdown of government agencies that would close national parks, shutter passport offices and turn off the Internal Revenue -Service taxpayer information hotline just a week before the April 15 filing deadline. Essential federal workers would stay on the job, including the military, FBI agents and coast guard. Social Security payments would still go out and the mail would be delivered.
The unusually heated spending fight grows from many sources this year, first among them the coming presidential election next year and the heightened political jostling as the campaign heats up.
Further fueling the dispute is the power of newly elected -Republican-allied “Tea Party” members in the House of Representatives. They won their seats last November on promises of less spending, smaller government and no tax increases. They are making it hard for -Boehner to compromise.
The spiraling US debt, partly a result of massive federal spending to rescue the financial system and the economy during the “Great Recession,” has become a major issue in US politics.
Republicans, particularly the most conservative among them, have made federal red ink a top policy issue, declaring it a threat to US security.
The conservative ideology pushes for less government involvement in Americans’ day-to-day lives. The Republicans do not address the major tax cuts implemented during the administration of former US president George W. Bush, a key factor in declining government revenues, and, therefore, increasing debt.
Obama and Democrats largely agree there is a major debt problem, but Democrats see it as less urgent. Democrats say Republican budget cutters will cause a collapse of the fragile economic recovery while also imposing too much pain on needy or working-class Americans who rely on government help, especially in difficult economic times. While improving, US unemployment is still nearly 9 percent.
Immediately at issue in the budget fight is money to run government agencies for the remainder of this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. Before they ceded power to Republicans in the House in January, Democrats, too, had not passed legislation to fund the government for the entire year.
Since Republicans took over and Boehner became House speaker, he has engineered a pair of stopgap bills that have so far cut US$10 billion from the estimated US$1.2 trillion budget. Senate Democrats and Obama agreed to those temporary infusions of money, hoping this final run at a funding law would produce a compromise acceptable to both sides.
That has not happened and a frustrated Obama said he would be calling Boehner back to the White House yesterday and again today if a deal is not struck.
There was at least a hint of flexibility on Tuesday. According to Democratic and Republican officials, Boehner suggested at the White House meeting that fellow Republicans might be able to accept a deal with US$40 billion in cuts. That’s more than negotiators had been eyeing, but less than the House seeks.
Short of a long-term deal, Boehner has proposed an agreement that would keep the government running for one more week and cut another US$12 billion in spending.
Obama said he would accept another short-term funding extension, of only two or three days, to get a longer-term deal through Congress, but he ruled out a longer extension to allow negotiations to continue.
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