Obama sets conditions for talks: Pass funding and raise debt ceiling

In their first meeting since a budget impasse shuttered many federal operations, President Obama told Republican leaders on Wednesday that he would negotiate with them only after they agreed to the funding needed to reopen the government and also to an essential increase in the nation’s debt limit, without add-ons.

The president’s position reflected the White House view that the Republicans’ strategy is failing. His meeting with Congressional leaders, just over an hour long, ended without any resolution.

As they left, Republican and Democratic leaders separately reiterated their contrary positions to waiting reporters. The House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said Mr. Obama “will not negotiate,” while the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said Democrats would agree to spending at levels already passed by the House. “My friend John Boehner cannot take ‘yes’ for an answer,” Mr. Reid said.

The meeting was the first time that the president linked the two actions that he and a divided Congress are fighting over this month: a budget for the fiscal year that began on Tuesday, and an increase in the debt ceiling by Oct. 17, when the Treasury Department will otherwise breach its authority to borrow the money necessary to cover the nation’s existing obligations to citizens, contractors and creditors.

Only when those actions are taken, Mr. Obama said, would he agree to revive bipartisan talks toward a long-term budget deal addressing the growing costs of Medicare and Medicaid and the inadequacy of federal tax revenues.

While the lack of a budget forced the government shutdown this week, failure to raise the debt limit would have worse repercussions, threatening America’s credit rating with a globe-shaking default and risking an economic relapse at home. Yet the refusal by the Republican-led House earlier this week to approve government funding until Mr. Obama agrees to delay his signature health-care law — a nonnegotiable demand, he has said — raised fears from Washington to Wall Street that Republicans likewise would carry out their threat to withhold approval of an increase in the debt ceiling.

In a meeting with Wall Street executives to enlist their help, and then in an interview with CNBC before his White House meeting with Congressional leaders, Mr. Obama said he needed to draw a firm line “to break that fever” in the House among hard-line conservatives who repeatedly issued fiscal ultimatums, resulting in government by crisis.

“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,” Mr. Obama told CNBC, a cable business-news channel.

Mr. Boehner, under pressure from Republican conservatives and outside Tea Party groups, has declined to bring a so-called clean continuing resolution to the House for a vote because it would pass mostly with Democrats’ votes and probably prompt a conservative backlash that could cost him his leadership office.

Mr. Obama, in the interview, said he must resist the Republican demands this time because a precedent is at stake. “If we get in the habit where a few folks, an extremist wing of one party, whether it’s Democrat or Republican, are allowed to extort concessions based on a threat of undermining the full faith and credit of the United States, then any president who comes after me — not just me — will find themselves unable to govern effectively,” he said.

Many Republicans concede that Mr. Obama has the political advantage in the current confrontation, so some in the House reacted hopefully to the president’s summons to Congressional leaders to meet late in the day. Representative Michael G. Grimm, Republican of New York, called the White House meeting “the beginning of the end of the government shutdown,” although others in Congress and the administration were less optimistic.

Frustrations in Congress were mounting along with voters’ anger. Clusters of House Republicans filtered in and out of Mr. Boehner’s office, some pleading for him to stand firm, others seeking a face-saving end to the shutdown. Mr. Grimm said he was one of a half-dozen Republican pragmatists who urged the speaker to find a way to reopen the government.

Publicly, however, House Republican leaders pressed forward with a new strategy to try to throw Democrats, in particular Mr. Obama, on the defensive. They proposed bills to open those parts of the government whose closings were drawing the most criticism, a list that grew as citizens’ complaints came in.