Friday, July 22, 2011
Associated Press
WASHINGTON
In secretive endgame negotiations, President Barack Obama and House Republican leaders reached anew Thursday for an elusive “grand bargain” deal to cut deficits by $4 trillion or more and prevent a threatened Aug. 2 government default, officials said.
House Speaker John Boehner declared that his rank and file generally stood ready to compromise in order to reach an agreement as a way of “getting our economy going again and growing jobs.” Obama, in a newspaper opinion piece, said the talks provided an “opportunity to do something big and meaningful.”
Still, 12 days before the default deadline, officials stressed that no compromise appeared imminent. And new hope of one ran instantly into old resistance: from Republicans opposed to higher taxes and Democrats loath to cut Medicare and other benefit programs.
In a measure of concern among Democrats, party leaders spent nearly two hours meeting with Obama at the White House late Thursday.
While talks on a major, long-term agreement continued, a fresh, shorter-term backup plan appeared to be gaining momentum. Under discussion among some House Republicans, that proposal would cut spending by $1 trillion or slightly more immediately and raise the debt limit by a similar amount — enough to postpone a final reckoning until early in 2012.
Across the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blamed some of the same Republicans — “tea- party extremists,” he called them — of blocking a deal.
The sometimes-conflicting information underscored the frenzied final days before a threatened default, when the Treasury would no longer be able to pay all its bills in full and the economy could go into a tailspin as interest rates spiked.
In an opinion piece in USA Today posted Thursday evening, Obama restated his call for achieving deficit reduction through “historic” amounts of spending cuts but also through “fundamental tax reform.”
Boehner, not wanting to anger conservatives who hoped — despite every appearance to the contrary — that they could push far deeper cuts through the Senate in the next few days.
“There is no deal. No deal publicly, no deal privately, there is absolutely no deal,” he told conservative talk-show radio host Rush Limbaugh.