White House Meeting on Budget Fails to End Impasse
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: April 7, 2011
WASHINGTON — A crucial White House meeting between President Obama and Congressional leaders to try to solve a budget impasse that threatens to shut parts of the United States government down ended Thursday night with no deal but progress on some issues, Mr. Obama said.
Philip Scott Andrews/The New York Times
John A. Boehner, the speaker of the House, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, after leaving a meeting with President Obama at the White House on Thursday.
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, with Sen. Dick Durbin on Thursday, said that he was “not nearly as optimistic” about avoiding a shutdown as he was after a Wednesday night Oval Office meeting.
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"I think we are further along today than we were yesterday," Mr. Obama said. But, he warned, "we are now 30 hours away from shutting down."
The meeting had been delayed more than an hour as lower-level negotiators made some progress in their discussions. The hourlong meeting, between Mr. Obama; Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader; and John A. Boehner of Ohio, the speaker of the House, started shortly after 8 p.m. and was the third between them in 24 hours.
After the second meeting Thursday afternoon, the two Congressional leaders said the talks had moved negotiations forward. A deal would avert a threatened shutdown of the federal government when the current stopgap budget bill runs out on Friday.
“We are going to continue to work to get this done,” Mr. Reid said. “It’s not easy to do, but it’s doable.”
Mr. Boehner expressed disappointment that the president had vowed to veto a new Republican-backed stopgap measure that the House passed on Thursday by a vote of 247 to 181. That measure would finance most of the government for another week, and the Pentagon for the rest of the fiscal year, while cutting $12 billion in current spending; it had almost no chance of passage in the Senate.
Ideological disputes over abortion financing and changes to the nation’s clean air laws have proven to be major obstacles to a deal. Republicans insisted that the negotiators are also divided over how deeply to slash spending, though Democrats said the two sides were close on dollar figures.
Congressional officials said that the sparring over money had gotten down essentially to a fight over $5 billion or less. Mr. Boehner, whose bid for $40 billion in spending cuts was rejected on Wednesday, came back on Thursday with a proposal for $39 billion in cuts, the officials said, while the Democrats’ top budget aides, working through the night, returned Thursday morning with a proposal for $34.5 billion in cuts, $3 billion of it coming from Pentagon spending.
In threatening to veto the Republicans’ stopgap measure, Mr. Obama called it “a distraction from the real work that would bring us closer to a reasonable compromise.” Even so, he said he would agree to a counterproposal from House Democrats for a one-week extension free of any further spending cuts or policy restrictions — but the Republicans who control the House brushed that off. “We don’t accept the status quo,” said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader.
Earlier in the day, passions ran high in the House debate as Mr. Cantor and Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, exchanged sharp remarks over who was to blame for the looming shutdown, to jeers from lawmakers on the opposite side.
“We never shut down the government when we were in the majority and President Bush had power,” Mr. Hoyer said. “There is a rational way for us to proceed, and very frankly, when we were in your shoes, we did so, when we couldn’t reach agreement with President Bush.”
For his part, Mr. Cantor said the Democrats were at fault for not enacting a budget or the required spending bills last year when they still controlled the House. “We are trying to do the business of the American people,” Mr. Cantor said. “We do not want to shut the government down. We don’t accept the status quo. We don’t want to bankrupt this nation. We believe there is a fiscal crisis demanding urgent action.”
In the morning, Mr. Boehner and Mr. Reid each said that negotiators were stuck on some of the 40 Republican-sponsored policy provisions included in the budget legislation, which would dictate how money could or could not be spent until the end of the federal fiscal year in September. Those include prohibitions on government payments to abortion providers and restrictions on theEnvironmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate air pollution.
“There’s far more than one provision that’s holding up any agreement, I can tell you that,” Mr. Boehner said at a news conference.
Mr. Reid said that Republicans had “drawn a line in the sand” on issues of abortion financing and changes to the Clean Air Act, and that those issues could not be resolved in the hours left before a government shutdown.
“The numbers are basically there,” Mr. Reid said on the floor of the Senate, adding that “the only thing holding up an agreement is ideology,” referring to the policy provisions, which he said “have no place on a budget bill.” Mr. Boehner rejected Mr. Reid’s assertion that negotiators had settled on the scale of cuts, and that only policy differences stood in the way of a deal.
“There is no agreement on a number,” Mr. Boehner told reporters, adding: “We’re going to have real spending cuts. I don’t know what some people don’t understand about this.”
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