Apparently these Republicans don't understand how Washington is supposed to work. It works like this: You never pass a real budget. You just pass a succession of continuing resolutions, and the content of those is determined by the president's party. If the other party controls a house of Congress, that should not be mistaken for having a say in anything. They are supposed to just pass the "clean" CR the president likes and that's that.
Since Boehner and McConnell have suddenly stopped playing by these rules after two-and-a-half years of behaving themselves, Obama is beside himself, and has no intention of negotiating. Yahoo! News reports:
The 90-minute meeting came after the House and Senate failed to reach an agreement on federal spending levels this week, and House Republican leaders refused to hold a vote on a funding bill that didn’t also delay or defund part of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid met with Obama. Vice President Joseph Biden and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew were also present.
“The president reiterated one more time tonight that he will not negotiate,” Boehner told reporters after the meeting.
McConnell said in a statement, “The meeting was cordial but unproductive. While I appreciated the opportunity to speak directly with the President about this pressing issue, I was disappointed that he had little interest in negotiating a solution or in encouraging Senate Democrats to agree to the House request for a conference.”
Just hours before, Obama sounded a pessimistic tone about striking an agreement and warned Wall Street not to assume that Washington will somehow wring a deal out of partisan bitterness.
"This time's different," Obama told CNBC when asked whether investors should assume a deal on the budget and debt is close. "I think they should be concerned. ... When you have a situation in which a faction is willing potentially to default on U.S. government obligations then we are in trouble. And if they're willing to do it now, they'll be willing to do it later."
Of course, Obama is skipping past the shutdown to the debt ceiling, but that raises a question, does it not? If refusing to raise the debt ceiling would force a default, and that is so catastrophic, why won't Obama negotiate? Pride? Would he really allow the global financial meltdown Democrats are forecasting to avoid delaying ObamaCare a year? From a policy perspective, is that the right call?
You can yelp all you want that Republicans shouldn't be putting a refusal to raise the debt ceiling on the table. I would counter that Democrats shouldn't have put ObamaCare on the table, and the latter is just as ruinous as the former - and likely far more so.
But we've got our shutdown and we just might be headed for the default too, because Obama doesn't think the choice of the voters to give Republicans a majority in the House should obligate him to negotiate away anything he wants. If it was that important to him, he would make a deal. I guess it's not.
