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| President Barack Obama speaks about the government shutdown and debt ceiling during a visit to M. Luis Construction, which specializes in asphalt manufacturing, concrete paving, and roadway reconstruction, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2013, in Rockville, Md. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- Three days into a government shutdown, President Barack Obama
pointedly blamed House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday for keeping
federal agencies closed, while the bitter budget dispute moved closer to
a more critical showdown over the nation's line of credit. The Treasury
warned of calamitous results if Congress fails to raise the debt limit.
Answering
Obama, Boehner complained that the president was "steamrolling ahead"
with the implementation of the nation's new health care law. As the
government operated sporadically, the stock market sank to its lowest
level in nearly a month.
The shutdown was
clearly leaving its mark. The National Transportation Safety Board
wasn't sending investigators to Tennessee to probe a deadly church bus
crash that killed eight people and sent 14 others to the hospital. The
Labor Department said it wouldn't release the highly anticipated
September jobs report on Friday because the government remains
shuttered.
Outside the Capitol, shots rang out
at midafternoon bringing an already tense Congress under lockdown, a
nerve-wracking moment in a city still recovering from a Sept. 16 mass
shooting at the Navy Yard. Authorities and witnesses said a woman tried
to ram her car through a White House barricade then led police on a
chase that ended in gunfire and her death outside the Capitol more than 1
mile away.
Despite the heated political
rhetoric, some signs of a possible way out of the shutdown emerged. But
the state of play remained in flux.
Two House
Republicans said Boehner told them he would allow a House vote on
restarting the entire government - but only if conservative GOP
lawmakers assured him they would not attack it for failing to contain
curbs on the health care law. So far they have been unwilling to give
that commitment. The two spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal
details of private discussions.
The shutdown
and the approaching debt ceiling were merging into one confrontation,
raising the stakes for the president and Congress as well as for the
economy.
Obama and his Treasury Department
said that failure to raise the nation's borrowing limit, expected to hit
its $16.7 trillion cap in mid-October, could precipitate an economic
nosedive worse than the Great Recession. A default could cause the
nation's credit markets to freeze, the value of the dollar to plummet
and U.S. interest rates to skyrocket, according to the Treasury report.
Obama
catalogued a litany of troubles that could be caused by the failure to
raise the debt ceiling, from delayed Social Security and disability
checks to worldwide economic repercussions. "If we screw up, everybody
gets screwed up," he said.
The speaker's
office reiterated Boehner's past assertion that he would not let the
United States default on its debt. "But if we're going to raise the
debt limit, we need to deal with the drivers of our debt and deficits,"
his spokesman, Michael Steel, said. "That's why we need a bill with cuts
and reforms to get our economy moving again."
Conservatives
have insisted that either reopening the government or increasing the
debt ceiling must be accompanied by a measure that either delays or
defunds the nation's new health care law. Absent those concessions,
Republicans want cuts in spending, savings in major benefit programs and
an overhaul of the tax system.
Obama, for his part, firmly restated his opposition to a negotiation.
"You
don't get to demand some ransom in exchange for keeping the government
running," he said tartly. "You don't get to demand ransom in exchange
for keeping the economy running."
Looking to
deflect the Democratic finger-pointing on the shutdown, the
Republican-controlled House pushed a pair of bills through the House on
Thursday restoring money to veterans' programs and to pay National Guard
and Reserve members. House leaders also have scheduled a vote on
legislation backed by some of the chamber's top Democrats to give
federal workers furloughed in the ongoing partial shutdown their missed
pay when the government reopens.
That vote could come as early as Friday or over the weekend.
Senate
Democrats made clear they will not agree to reopening the government on
a piecemeal basis. "You can't fall for that legislative blackmail or it
will get worse and worse and worse," said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New
York.
Speaking at a construction company in
Washington's Maryland suburbs Thursday, Obama cast Boehner as a captive
of a tight group of conservative Republicans who want to extract
concessions in exchange for passing a short-term spending bill that
would restart the partially shuttered government.
"The
only thing preventing people from going back to work and basic research
starting back up and farmers and small business owners getting their
loans, the only thing that is preventing all that from happening right
now, today, in the next five minutes is that Speaker John Boehner won't
even let the bill get a yes or no vote because he doesn't want to anger
the extremists in his party," Obama said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was even more pointed in singling Boehner out.
"We
can't perform the most basic functions of government because he doesn't
have the courage to stand up to that small band of anarchists," he
said.
Moderate Republicans have said they
think they could provide enough votes to join with minority Democrats
and push a bill through the House reopening the government with no
restrictions on the health care law. But under pressure from House GOP
leaders, they failed to join Democratic efforts on Wednesday aimed at
forcing the chamber to consider such legislation.
Rep.
Tom Cole, R-Okla., who is close to Boehner, said he doesn't think the
speaker is ready to push any measure that would fail to win the backing
of most of his 232 House Republicans. But some Democratic votes
eventually will be needed in the 435-seat chamber, Cole said, because
some hard-core conservative Republicans are unlikely to vote to end the
shutdown or raise the debt ceiling without major concessions from Obama.
"You
can't ask those Republicans to just put their political life on the
line for nothing," he said. "They've got to be able to go home and say
`These are the things that I was able to do.'"
Even
the Senate chaplain got drawn into the rising intensity of the partisan
battle, opening Thursday's session with an unusually pointed prayer.
"Deliver
us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being
unreasonable," said Dr. Barry Black. "Remove the burdens of those who
are the collateral damage of this government shutdown."
And
in a bit of sardonic understatement, Obama's motorcade passed workers
outside an office building holding up a sign that simply asked, "Rough
week?"
