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U.S. Gov’t shutdown: Obama cancels Asia trip
On Friday, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives planned a vote to fund a popular program providing food aid to pregnant women and their children, as well as ongoing disaster relief. The White House and Democratic allies in Congress reject the strategy of passing piecemeal efforts to finance essential and popular programs and want a vote on a straightforward measure to fund the entire government through mid-November or mid-December.
Republican leaders like Republican House Speaker John Boehner originally had tried to engineer such an outcome but were forced to change course after protests from a small group of very conservative lawmakers seeking to defund the president’s health care law.
Furloughed federal workers were expected to get some relief with legislation authorizing back pay due for a vote on Friday or Saturday.
Obama has turned more personal in his criticism of Republicans for seeking to use a temporary funding bill to extract concessions on his health care law, calling out Boehner as standing in the way of a vote for a bill with no strings attached.
“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. That’s all. That’s what this whole thing is about,” Obama said Thursday.
Lawmakers said the battle over the government shutdown seemed to be quickly merging with a more critical showdown over the nation’s expiring line of credit, raising the stakes for the still-fragile economy. The U.S. Treasury warned that failure to raise the debt ceiling could spark a new recession even worse than the one Americans are still recovering from.
Obama and his Treasury Department said failure to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, expected to hit its US$16.7 trillion cap in mid-October, could precipitate an economic nosedive worse than the recent Great Recession. A default could cause the nation’s credit markets to freeze, the value of the dollar to plummet and U.S. interest rates to skyrocket, according to a Treasury report Thursday.
