WASHINGTON — The Obama administration yesterday toned down its hard-line insistence on not cutting a deal with Republicans in the effort to raise the national debt limit.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner instead said it would be OK to negotiate “parallel” budget cuts to try to placate the GOP in exchange for its support on raising the debt limit — the first time a White House official hinted at such a concession.
Earlier this month, Obama reached across the aisle to cut $38.5 billion from the 2011 spending plan in order to gain Republican support.
Geithner, who made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows yesterday, says Republicans recognize the importance of the vote to raise the nation’s borrowing authority, which reaches its statutory limit next month.
He added that it would be “catastrophic” if the government didn’t raise the debt limit to meet its obligations.
“I want to make it perfectly clear that Congress will raise the debt ceiling,” Geithner told ABC’s “This Week.”
“They recognize it and they told the president that on Wednesday in the White House, and I sat there with them and they said, ‘We recognize we have to do this and we’re not going to play around with it, because we know the risk would catastrophic.’ ”
But Republican leaders, from House Speaker John Boehner down, have said an increase in the debt limit must be tied to spending cuts in order to pass.
Thus far, the official White House position is that Congress must pass a “clean” debt increase.
But that language changed yesterday.
“I think you can do these things in parallel,” Geithner told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“But if by the time we need to raise the debt limit, we haven’t worked all that out, Congress still has to raise the debt limit.”
House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Republicans would leverage spending — as they recently did to fund the government through September.
“In addition to raising the debt limit, we want financial controls, we want cuts in spending accompanying a raising of the debt ceiling,” Ryan told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“We shouldn’t just accept the premise that we have just to rubber-stamp a debt increase without any spending controls,” Ryan added.
He also said he wanted to “lock in” recently enacted cuts while setting new caps on so-called discretionary spending.