Obama ratcheted up his rhetoric against the House GOP, saying during a speech in Maryland that House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, is the only thing standing between an end to the shutdown.
President Barack Obama talks about the federal government shutdown at an event in Rockville, Md., Thursday.
"Right now, hundreds of thousands of Americans -- hard-working Americans -- suddenly aren't receiving their paychecks," Obama said at a construction company in a Maryland in suburban Washington.
As Obama spoke, the government remained shuttered for its third straight business day with no resolution to the shutdown in sight.
A slew of Capitol Hill press conferences were on the schedule for Thursday, almost all of them intended by Republicans to place political fallout for the shutdown with Democrats, and vice-versa.
But Obama was hardly immune from the posturing, too. He employed some of his sharpest rhetoric to date against House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Republicans in Congress -- seizing upon one GOP lawmaker's admission on Wednesday that Republicans want to feel as though they're "respected" by the administration.
"If you're being disrespected, it's because of that attitude you've got -- that you deserve to get something for doing your job," he said.
Boehner said in a statement: "It's time for the president and Senate Democrats to come to the negotiating table and drop their my-way-or-the-highway approach that gave us this shutdown."
In short, little had changed heading into Thursday in the showdown for funding the government, spending for which lapsed at the end of Sept. 30.
As negotiations continued to stalemate, the House GOP continued to take up a number of mini-spending bills purposefully crafted to reinstate spending for some of the most visible closures forced by the shutdown. The legislation – like one bill to reinstate funding for the National Institutes of Health – were more intended as vehicles for Republican messaging than anything else. Republicans, for instance, suggested that Democrats were unsympathetic to cancer patients for opposing that bill because the shutdown meant that children with cancer could not enter into new trial therapy programs.
The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd recaps the meeting between President Barack Obama and Republican leaders over the shutdown. Todd explains how the meeting focused on what House Speaker John Boehner will do.
The other mini-funding bills, on which the House will continue working on Thursday, would fund the DC city government, operations of national parks, maintaining pay for military reservists and tackling the backlog of claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The White House has said that Obama would veto each of these, and Senate Democrats were expected to kill the items before they ever reached the president’s desk. Democrats argued – as they have for days on end – that the best way to restore funding for these programs would be to reinstate funding for all of government by passing the six-week “clean” extension of government spending favored by the Senate.
Obama underlined his hard-lined stance during his speech in Maryland, saying there would be "no negotiations" over funding the government, or raising the nation's debt limit in a few weeks.
"The American people pawns in some sort of political game," he said.
But despite the GOP bluster throughout the shutdown, Republican resolve showed signs of cracking throughout the day on Wednesday. Democrats gleefully kept track of the steadily-mounting number of House Republicans who have said they would vote for a “clean” stopgap spending measure.
If 18 Republicans were to join every Democrat in the House in supporting such a measure, it would mean a majority of the House would effectively support a clean stopgap spending measure.
Democrats have kept the tally to portray Boehner as the impediment to a vote to reinstate government operations.
"There are enough Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives today that if the speaker of the House, John Boehner, simply let the bill get on the floor for an up-or-down vote ... the shutdown would end today," Obama said.
As the shutdown persisted, new polling suggested that three-quarters of Americans wished that Republicans, along with Obama and his Democratic allies, would come together and compromise on the fiscal impasse.
But at this stage of the shutdown, more Americans blame Republicans in Congress for the shutdown than Obama and Democrats in Congress. Forty-four percent of Americans blame the GOP for the shutdown, found a new CBS News poll conducted after the shutdown came to pass. Thirty-five percent of American blamed Obama and congressional Democrats, while 17 percent blamed both parties for the shuttering of the government.
Win Mcnamee / Getty Images
The
impact of the first government shutdown in 17 years was felt across
America as offices were shuttered and workers were sent home after
lawmakers failed to come to a deal.
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