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House Republicans arrived at the White House on Wednesday for a meeting with the president to focus on the debt limit.
By CARL HULSE and JACKIE CALMES
Published: June 2, 2011
WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner said Wednesday that Congress and the White House should try to reach an agreement within the next month that would combine an increase in the federal debt limit with deep spending cuts, and he called on President Obama to play a larger role in negotiations.
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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
The House speaker, John A. Boehner, said Wednesday that reaching a deal on the budget could avoid more market turmoil.
In a meeting with reporters after a White House session between House Republicans and the president, Mr. Boehner said a budget deal well in advance of the Treasury Department’s Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling could avoid the prospect of adverse market reactions.
“This really needs to be done over the next month if we are serious about no brinksmanship and no rattling investors,” Mr. Boehner said.
“The president could engage himself,” he added. “I’m willing. I’m ready. It is time to have the conversation. It is time to play large ball, not small ball.”
A bipartisan team of lawmakers from the House and Senate has been meeting with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to fashion a budget agreement that could clear the way for a vote to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit, a step Mr. Boehner and other Republicans say they will not take without corresponding spending cuts. The speaker said the group was making marginal progress but at its current pace would brush up against the August deadline.
Mr. Boehner said he had had no discussions with the White House about involving the president in the negotiations.
As the Biden negotiations have been unfolding, it was considered likely that Mr. Boehner would have to agree on any package negotiated by lawmakers who included Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader. Aides said Mr. Boehner’s comments were not meant to be critical of the Biden talks.
Mr. Boehner’s comments came after stock markets closed down 2 percent, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling 280 points, the biggest slide in a year. While the sell-off came amid new, disappointing economic data on manufacturing and jobs, Democrats had warned Tuesday that Republicans were risking a market reaction by staging a House vote that evening overwhelmingly rejecting an increase in the debt limit, which they did to pressure the White House to agree to spending cuts.
The White House meeting on Wednesday was expected to focus on the debt limit fight, but instead got caught up in the dispute over Medicare.
Following the session, Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the Budget Committee, said he asked Mr. Obama to not engage in demagogy about the Republicans’ Medicare plan, which was under fierce attack from Democrats as essentially being a voucher program for older Americans.
“We simply described to him precisely what it is we’ve been proposing, so that he hears from us how our proposal works, so that in the future, he won’t mischaracterize it,” Mr. Ryan said.
Jay Carney, a spokesman for the president, disputed the notion that Mr. Obama had ever misconstrued the proposal, which would essentially subsidize those now younger than 55 in private insurance plans rather than have the federal government serve as the insurer of older Americans as it now does.
“It is a voucher plan,” Mr. Carney said. “If you’re basically giving a subsidy of a set dollar figure that’s limited in terms of its growth and that won’t stay up with the growth in medical costs, I mean, that’s — you’re basically getting a certain amount of money to put towards buying insurance.”
According to an administration official in the meeting, when Mr. Ryan told Mr. Obama that he had mischaracterized the House plan, Mr. Obama replied: “Paul, I’ve read your plan. I do my homework.” And after Mr. Ryan made the point that he proposed not a voucher but “premium support” for seniors to buy insurance, the president said that Mr. Ryan was shifting more costs to states and to older Americans, whereas his new health care law seeks savings from changes in how health care is delivered.
The official described the entire exchange as “respectful” on both sides; when another Republican leader raised the complaint early in the meeting that Mr. Obama had attacked them and their budget plan, Mr. Obama lightly noted that since he had taken office he had been called a job-killing socialist who created death panels and was not born in America.
In a coincidence that reinforced the stakes in the Medicare fight, Kathy Hochul was sworn in on Wednesday as the newest member of the House. Last week’s victory by Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, in a Republican district in upstate New York was largely attributed to her campaign against the Republican plan for Medicare.
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