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‘Reckless’ Shutdown Must End, Obama Says, Faulting G.O.P. Rattled Congress Seeks Way Out of Its Standoff
(about 19 hours later)
WASHINGTON — An impassioned President Obama on Thursday kept up the pressure on House Republicans to end the three-day-old government shutdown, appearing at a small construction company outside the capital to challenge Speaker John A. Boehner to quit blocking a vote on federal spending. WASHINGTON — Republican efforts to resolve the fiscal standoff that has closed much of the federal government heated up Thursday, the third day of the shutdown, with new talks over a broad budget deal and an effort by more moderate House members to break the logjam.
“This isn’t happening because of some financial crisis. It’s happening because of a reckless Republican shutdown in Washington,” he said, to cheers and calls of “That’s right!” from the assembled construction workers at M. Luis Construction, a company formed by Portuguese immigrants in Rockville, Md., a suburb north of Washington. Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, has initiated conversations with senior House Republicans on a broad deficit reduction deal that would allow some increases to federal programs squeezed by the automatic cuts known as sequestration in exchange for long-term changes to programs like Medicare and Social Security. The package would most likely include instructions to try to move along efforts to simplify the tax code as well.
“Remember, it was just five years ago that our economy was in a free fall,” Mr. Obama said, speaking on the fifth anniversary of Congress’s vote to bail out the nearly collapsed financial system. Since then, he said, businesses have added more than 7.5 million jobs, an improving housing market has helped construction companies recover, and auto sales have continued to grow. “We can’t afford to threaten that progress right now.” Aides described those talks as “conversations about conversations,” not true negotiations, and they favored the term “down payment” on the deficit over “grand bargain.” But the “down payment” that Mr. Ryan is pursuing must come together fast, to provide a framework that Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio can use to win over enough Republicans to reopen the government and raise the Treasury’s statutory borrowing limit before a government default in two weeks.
Mr. Obama’s appearance came just after the Treasury Department released a report arguing that a default could provoke a recession “comparable to or worse” than the one deepened by the financial crisis of 2008, which was the worst since the Depression. “The longer this goes, the closer we get to the debt limit and the more the two of these roll together,” said Representative James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma and a member of the Budget Committee. “If any agreement is going to happen we’re going to have to have multiple negotiators rather than have Boehner come back with it.”
Besides the well-publicized disruption of the shutdown for tourists, veterans, older people and children in Head Start, Mr. Obama added, “Companies like this one worry that their businesses are going to be disrupted.” The federal government provides $1 billion a month in loans to small businesses that now cannot be processed, he said. In a Capitol rattled by a shooting on the grounds that killed a woman and injured a police officer, tempers have flared and pressure appears to be mounting to resolve a stalemate that has shut large parts of the government, sidelined 800,000 federal workers and forced more than one million more to work without pay.
“The longer this goes on, the worse it will be,” he said. “And it makes no sense. The American people elected their representatives to make their lives easier, not harder.” As the shooting incident was still unfolding, Representative Tim Griffin, Republican of Arkansas, took to Twitter to imply a connection with the shots fired outside the Capitol and the heated words inside. “Stop the violent rhetoric President Obama, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. #Disgusting,” he wrote, only to delete the message later.
He told his audience what even House Republicans have acknowledged: that if Mr. Boehner let the Republican-controlled House vote on a measure passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate to continue spending at current levels for two months, it would pass with support from most Democrats and some Republicans. But Republican leaders insist that Mr. Obama must agree to defund or delay his Affordable Care Act. There were signs on Thursday, however, that some lawmakers were willing to work together to end the dispute. About 20 Republicans and Democrats signed on to a proposal that would reopen the government, finance it for six months and repeal the health care law’s tax on medical devices, a provision that has bipartisan opposition.
“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,” the president said. If the speaker allows a vote, Mr. Obama added, within minutes “we can get back to the business of helping the American people.” Representatives Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin, framed it as a compromise that both sides should be willing to accept to reopen the government.
On Wednesday night, after a private meeting among President Obama and four Congressional leaders ended without a break in the budget standoff, House Republicans on Thursday were expected to continue their attempts to pass piecemeal spending bills that would reopen sections of the government, one program at a time. “It’s important that we accept incremental progress when we can,” Mr. Dent said. “What we’re talking about here is leadership.”
But Democrats in the Senate have made it clear that they are unlikely to approve any House proposal unless it is a spending bill that would keep money flowing to the government with no strings attached. And since the Republicans have not abandoned their insistence that any budget measure include language defunding the president’s health care law, the government shutdown continues. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, approached Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, to try to open talks, also centered on the medical device tax as a face-saving victory for Republicans looking for a graceful way to back down.
The White House meeting on Wednesday — which included Mr. Boehner; Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican; Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader; and Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader — was described by the Republicans as “polite” but ultimately unproductive. And there has been some softening of the tone on the Republican side. Mr. Lankford, a member of the Republican leadership, conceded the “quandary” he faces in his district.
In an interview earlier on CNBC, Mr. Obama said he would not back down. “As soon as we get a clean piece of legislation that reopens the government — and there is a majority for that right now in the House of Representatives — until we get that done, until we make sure that Congress allows Treasury to pay for things that Congress itself already authorized, we are not going to engage in a series of negotiations.” “Some people like the Affordable Care Act, and like what’s happening with it. Some people really don’t,” he said. “People have two minds as they walk through it.”
Mr. Boehner, under pressure from Republican conservatives and outside Tea Party groups, has declined to bring such a continuing resolution to the House for a vote because it would pass mostly with Democratic votes — with some Republicans voting yes — and probably prompt a conservative backlash that could cost him his leadership office. President Obama, speaking in a Maryland suburb of Washington on Thursday, tried to keep the heat on Republicans, saying what many in the party freely acknowledge: if Mr. Boehner allowed the House to vote on a spending bill to reopen the government free of any provisions that would undermine the health care law, it would pass with bipartisan support.
But frustrations in Congress have grown stronger. “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,” Mr. Obama said. If the speaker did so, he added, within minutes “we can get back to the business of governing and helping the American people.”
Representatives Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin, have been quietly readying a clean spending bill to finance the government for six months that they hope will get bipartisan support. Their proposal includes the repeal of a tax on medical devices, which is unpopular with both parties but which helps pay for the health care law. On Thursday night, the president canceled the last of his scheduled destinations in a trip he had planned for Asia, saying the government shutdown had made it impossible to travel to a Pacific Rim economic conference in Indonesia or an East Asian security conference in Brunei next week.Senate Democrats, certain of their advantage, said they had no intention of accepting even the modest compromise the House centrists were offering.
Mr. Dent and Mr. Kind, according to an aide, have been talking with moderate House Republicans, hoping to bring them on board. If they are able to get enough Republican support, the aide said, they plan to announce with their bill in a news conference that could come as soon as Thursday. “I’m for changing the medical device tax,” Mr. Schumer said, “but I will not do it with a gun to my head.”
Some Republicans have urged Mr. Boehner to find a way to reopen the government, and lawmakers who have talked with the speaker said that he broached the idea of a comprehensive deficit-reduction deal that could put to rest three years of gridlock and turmoil in the Republican-led House. The House’s hard-liners, however, indicated that they were not ready to give in. Representative Phil Gingrey, Republican of Georgia, acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers were suffering, and more than a million more were working without pay.
That has all been behind the scenes. In public, there has been no change. That includes Republican efforts to try to finance certain programs — many of them popular — and at the same time embarrass to Democrats who promise to defeat those attempts in the Senate. “There’s some pain and suffering, but I don’t think that pain and suffering compares one bit to being stuck with a lifetime of Obamacare, so that’s why I’m holding pretty firm on this,” he said.
On Wednesday, House Republicans successfully passed measures to reopen the national parks, memorials and federal-funded museums; to finance the National Institutes of Health; and to allow the District of Columbia to use local revenue to finance basic services. Democrats signaled that they would reject the measures when they reached the Senate. The House on Thursday sought to relieve some of the pain caused by the shutdown by pressing forward with a series of small spending bills to reopen the parts of government deemed most politically sensitive, voting to fund veterans’ programs and pay inactive National Guardsmen and reservists. Those bills followed measures to restart clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health, reopen national parks, monuments and museums, and allow the District of Columbia to maintain city services.
The Republicans ran out of time for two other bills — one to restart veterans’ programs and another to pay the National Guard and Reserves — but expect to pass them on Thursday. In a twist, House Republicans claimed they were supporting federal spending while heartless Democrats were blocking those efforts. Representative Renee Ellmers, Republican of North Carolina and a nurse, stepped to a microphone in the Capitol, her voice choked with tears, to call on Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, to allow a vote on the N.I.H. bill.
House Republican aides said that barring any breakthrough, they plan to continue with that strategy and are likely to offer an additional batch of small funding bills on Thursday. One proposal under discussion was a measure to reopen the Head Start programs that serve preschoolers from low-income homes. Conservatives in the House continued to insist that Senate Democrats, especially those running for re-election in Republican states, would crack first. “There’s incredible pressure on Senate Democrats,” said Representative Tim Huelskamp, Republican of Kansas.
But red state Democrats gave no indication they were feeling that pressure. Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, one of the most endangered Democrats up for re-election in 2014, insisted that nothing was negotiable.
“Those games, those gimmicks are not going to work,” she said.

Jackie Calmes, Mark Landler and Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.