Negotiations between congressional GOP leaders and President Obama were expected to resume Monday after a tense Sunday night session ended without a deal to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by an Aug. 2 deadline. With just a few weeks to reach an agreement, the two parties left the White House on Sunday as far apart as ever on a plan that would rein in the nation’s staggering deficit while at the same time increasing its borrowing limit by about $2 trillion.
Obama has summoned lawmakers back to the White House on Monday for more talks and will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. on the status of the negotiations.
Recommended Stories
Lawmakers on Monday will likely be aiming for a far less ambitious deal than the $4 trillion package of savings and new revenue that Obama had proposed last week. Republicans made it clear over the weekend they object to the plan’s tax increases.
Aides said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, repeated in the hourlong Sunday talks what he told Obama on Saturday when he called to inform him he could not support the $4 trillion deal because it included a proposal to raise taxes. Instead, Boehner said, he would support a smaller deficit-reduction deal that had been under discussion in the recent bipartisan negotiations led by Vice President Biden.
That agreement, Boehner said, centered on approximately $2.5 trillion in cuts that would be achieved over 10 years through reductions in domestic and entitlement spending and savings on interest.
“The speaker told the group that he believes a package based on the work of the Biden group is the most viable option at this time for moving forward,” a Boehner aide said in describing Sunday’s White House talks. “The speaker restated the fundamental principles that must be met for any increase in the debt limit: spending cuts and reforms that are greater than the amount of the increase, restraints on future spending, and no tax hike.”
But Democrats say they remain committed to the $4 trillion deal and they adamantly refused to back a plan that cuts Social Security or Medicare benefits, or that makes deep cuts in spending without bringing in any new revenue from tax increases.
“We came into this weekend with the prospect that we could achieve a grand bargain,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “We are still hopeful for a large bipartisan agreement, which means more stability for our economy, more growth and jobs, and more deficit reduction over a longer period of time.”
Lawmakers and White House officials made the Sunday talk show rounds. Republican leaders used the venue to bash the tax increase proposal.
“Everything they told me and the speaker is that to get a big package would require a big tax increase in the middle of an economic situation that’s extraordinarily difficult with 9.2 percent unemployment,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told CNN’s “State of the Union” that despite claims by the GOP, the Biden talks had not yielded $2.5 trillion in cuts. “We were nowhere close to that,” Van Hollen said.
