WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said tonight he had summoned congressional leaders to the White House for a meeting on the debt ceiling Saturday after House Speaker John Boehner said he was walking away from the high-stakes discussions.
Obama said he had summoned Boehner (R-Ohio), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to a meeting at 11am ET Saturday.
“I want them here at 11 o’clock tomorrow. We have run out of time, and they are going to have to explain to me how we are going to avoid default,” Obama said.
Moments before the White House press conference, Boehner (R-Ohio) told Obama he was walking away from the discussions on raising the US debt ceiling and reducing the budget deficit.
Obama and Boehner had reportedly been working toward a $3 trillion deal that would have cut spending and included promises to revamp the tax code at a later date. News of the discussions angered Democrats, who have insisted that increased tax revenues be part of any budget deal.
Republicans, meanwhile, have said they would not support a deficit-reduction deal that includes increased taxes.
Obama told reporters that the plan Boehner walked away from was an “extraordinarily fair deal.”
But Boehner, in a press conference following Obama’s, said the White House had “moved the goal post” at the last minute.
“There was an agreement with the White House at $800 billion in revenues. It’s the president who walked away from his agreement and demanded more money at the last minute,” Boehner said, adding Obama had demanded $400 billion in additional revenues. The House Speaker said those revenues would have necessitated tax increases.
Obama said the deal would have included over $1 trillion in cuts to domestic and defense spending, $650 billion cuts to entitlement programs and tax revenues that were less than those called for in the so-called “Gang of Six” plan.
That plan, which Obama threw his support behind Tuesday, would have reduced the deficit by as much as $3.7 trillion over the next ten years. Proposed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, the plan was comprised of approximately 74 percent spending cuts and 26 percent new taxes and would have overhauled entitlement programs and reworked the tax code, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Both the president and Boehner said they remained confident that Congress would extend the $14.29 trillion borrowing limit by Aug. 2.
“We don’t have an option on that,” Obama said. “So if that’s the best that Congress can do, then I will sign an extension of the debt ceiling that takes us through 2013. I don’t think that’s enough … that’s the bare minimum.”
Asked about his relationship with Boehner, Obama said it has always been “cordial,” but said negotiations had been “very intense.” The president also said he “couldn’t get a phone call returned” Friday when he attempted to contact Boehner earlier Friday.
Obama hit out against House Republicans for their “seeming inability … to arrive at any kind of position that compromises any of their ideological preferences.”
And he praised his fellow Democrats, who he said “did not like the plan that we were proposing to Boehner” but who “were at least willing to engage in a conversation.”
“This is not a situation where somehow this was the usual food fight between Democrats and Republicans,” Obama said. “A lot of Democrats stepped up in ways that were not advantageous politically. So we’ve shown ourselves willing to do the tough stuff.”
Boehner said he would attend the White House talks Saturday and would continue to work Friday night with lawmakers on Capitol Hill toward a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
“We’ve put plan after plan on the table,” Boehner told reporters. “The House passed the Cut, Cap and Balance. Never once did the president ever come to the table with a plan. We were always pushing.”
Earlier Friday, the Senate voted to kill the “Cut, Cap and Balance” bill passed by the House on Tuesday. The bill would have cut 2012 fiscal spending by $111 billion and capped further spending at 19.9 percent of the country’s gross domestic product by 2012. It also included a balanced budget amendment requiring a two-thirds majority in both chambers for any future tax increases as a condition for raising the nation’s debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion.