Shutdown Day 3: No Compromise, No Negotiations From Obama

President Barack Obama laid the blame for the government's partial shutdown at the feet of House Speaker John Boehner, escalating a government-shutdown confrontation that was leading headlong into a potentially more damaging clash over the nation's borrowing authority.

Speaking at a construction company in Washington's Maryland suburbs Thursday, Obama cast Boehner as the captive of a small band 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.

The dispute over the shutdown deepened worries about a bigger problem rumbling ever closer — a mid-October deadline for increasing the government's borrowing limit before it runs out of money to pay creditors. The U.S. Treasury warned on Thursday that failure to raise that debt ceiling could spark a new recession even worse than the one Americans are still recovering from.

"The president remains hopeful that common sense will prevail," the White House said in a written statement after an unproductive meeting at the White House about the political standoff that has idled 800,000 federal workers and halted an array of services Americans expect from their government.

Boehner, R-Ohio, complained to reporters that Obama had used the meeting simply to declare anew that he won't negotiate over his healthcare law.

House Republicans, pushed by a core of tea party conservatives, are insisting that Obama accept changes to the healthcare law he pushed through Congress three years ago as part of the price for reopening all of government. Obama refuses to consider any deal linking the healthcare law to routine legislation needed to extend government funding or to raise the nation's debt limit.

Via: Newsmax

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