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| House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Oct. 7, 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. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- A possible national default loomed closer on Monday as the
partial government shutdown lingered, rattling markets in the U.S. and
overseas. A gridlocked Congress betrayed little or no urgency toward
resolving either of the threats.
Stocks got a
case of the jitters on Wall Street, and halfway around the world China
stressed the importance for the international economy of raising the
U.S. debt limit.
"Safeguarding the debt is of
vital importance to the economy of the U.S. and the world," Vice Finance
Minister Zhu Guangyao said, according to the official Xinhua News
Agency. China holds $1.277 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds, second only
to Japan.
At home, the political rhetoric was
unchanged - and generally uncompromising - while a new poll suggested
Republicans are paying a heavier price than Democrats for the deadlock.
President
Barack Obama said the House should vote immediately on ending the
partial closure of the federal establishment. He accused House Speaker
John Boehner of refusing to permit the necessary legislation to come to
the floor because he "doesn't apparently want to see the ... shutdown
end at the moment, unless he's able to extract concessions that don't
have anything to do with the budget."
Boehner,
in rebuttal, called on Obama to agree to negotiations on changes in the
nation's health care overhaul and steps to curb deficits, the principal
GOP demands for ending the shutdown and eliminating the threat of
default.
"Really, Mr. President. It's time to
have that conversation before our economy is put further at risk," the
Ohio Republican said in remarks on the House floor.
Obama
said he would talk with the Republicans on those topics or virtually
any others. But the White House has said repeatedly the president will
not negotiate until the government is fully re-opened and the debt limit
has been raised to stave off the nation's first-ever default.
White
House aide Jason Furman told reporters that if Boehner "needs to have
some talking point for his caucus that's consistent with us not
negotiating ... that's not adding a bunch of extraneous conditions, of
course he's welcome to figure out whatever talking point he wants that
helps him sell something."
The current
standoff is the latest in a string of clashes over the past three years
between Obama and a House Republican majority that has steered to the
right with the rise of the tea party.
Most
Democrats and many Republicans have assumed the GOP will pay a heavier
price for a shutdown than the Democrats, since that was the case in
1996.
And a survey released by the Washington
Post-ABC said disapproval of Republicans was measured at 70 percent, up
from 63 percent a week earlier. Disapproval of Obama's role was
statistically unchanged at 51 percent.
In the
Senate, where majority Democrats forced approval of legislation before
the shutdown aimed at preventing it, officials said Majority Leader
Harry Reid was drafting a bill to raise the current $16.7 trillion debt
ceiling before the Oct. 17 deadline when Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew
has said the government will reach its borrowing limit.
The
measure would allow the government to meet its borrowing needs through
the 2014 elections, officials said, although few details were
immediately available.
Assuming Democratic
support, the bill could pass the Senate quickly if Republicans merely
vote against it as they press for concessions from the White House. But
passage could be delayed until Oct. 17 if the GOP decides to mount a
filibuster.
Separately, a White House aide said Obama would be receptive to an interim, short-term measure to prevent default.
In the House, Republicans declined to say when they would put debt limit legislation on the floor for a vote.
Instead,
the public agenda for the day consisted of legislation to reopen the
Food and Drug Administration, the latest in a string of measures to
soften the impact of the partial shutdown.
Earlier
House-passed bills would end the shutdown at national parks, the
National Guard and Reserves and the Women, Infants and Children
nutrition program, and ease effects for the Washington, D.C.,
government, among other locations. Each of the measures cleared the
House with some Democratic support.
Yet each
is under a veto threat by the White House, and Reid opposes them in the
Senate as far less than the full restoration of government services that
most Democrats favor.
Still, the shutdown
eased over the weekend, when about 350,000 civilian defense workers were
recalled as the result of legislation Congress passed and Obama signed
after the shutdown began.
That left an
estimated 450,000 federal employees idle at agencies responsible for
domestic programs, ranging from the Departments of Education to Energy,
and including Labor, Health and Human Services, Interior, Transportation
and more.
The shutdown was felt unevenly,
however, because of bewilderingly complex rules and the ability of
senior officials to declare some projects essential and therefore
allowed to remain open.
Some routine food
checks by the FDA were suspended, but the Department of Agriculture's
meat inspections continued uninterrupted. Much of the nation's space
agency was shuttered, although work continued on plans to launch a
robotic probe to Mars, which has a once-every-two-years launch window.
Despite
the order returning civilian Pentagon workers to their government jobs,
defense contractor Lockheed Martin announced it would furlough about
2,400.
The Federal Emergency Management
Agency, where Obama visited, served as a demonstration for the variable
impact of the partial shutdown.
Officials said
the agency had furloughed about 86 percent of its workers, then had
recalled about 200 of them last week to prepare for the threat posed by
Tropical Storm Karen in the Gulf Coast region.
With the threat passed, Obama said at least 100 of them have been re-furloughed.
"That's no way of doing business," he said.
Whatever
the shutdown's inconveniences, it was easily rivaled by the warnings
over a default, in which the United States would not be able to pay all
its bills.
"A default would be unprecedented
and has the potential to be catastrophic," a 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.
Lew
has said that while Treasury expects to have $30 billion of cash on
hand on Oct. 17, that money would be quickly exhausted in paying
incoming bills given that the government's payments can run up to $60
billion on a single day.
