House Speaker John Boehner on Friday pulled out of negotiations with President Obama on raising the nation’s legal limit to borrow money, just days before an Aug. 2 deadline when the government can no longer pay all its bills and faces its first-ever possible default.
After informing the president in a phone call, Boehner sent a letter to lawmakers saying, “In the end, we couldn’t connect. Not because of different personalities, but because of different visions for our country.”
In a hastily arranged news conference in the White House briefing room, a visibly irritated Obama said that “it’s hard to understand why Speaker Boehner would walk away from this deal.”
“This was an extraordinarily fair deal,” he said, explaining that the White House offered more than $1 trillion in cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and defense and $650 billion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in exchange for $1.2 trillion in new revenues.
Boehner will now work with Senate leaders on an alternative “to find a path forward,” he wrote in the letter to lawmakers. But Obama said he wants to see congressional leaders at the White House Saturday to figure out how to avoid a government default.
“We have now run out of time,” Obama said.
According to a GOP leadership aide close to the talks, the sides were moving forward toward a total package that would cut $3 trillion to 3.5 trillion over a decade. It would have included an incremental increase in the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling now and force another one late next winter.
But the aide said a disagreement over revenues “blew this up.”
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
