Still Far Apart on Budget, Obama and House G.O.P. Meet

By JEREMY W. PETERS and ASHLEY PARKER

Published: March 13, 2013

WASHINGTON – President Obama headed back to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to win over his loudest critics in Congress: the restless and resistant House Republican majority.

After his session Tuesday with Senate Democrats, the president was to spend an hour with Speaker John A. Boehner and the 231 other House Republicans, who have regularly tangled with the White House and Senate Democrats over tax and spending policy. The fight is being renewed this week as House Republicans unveiled their budget, calling for a repeal of the new health care law and a major overhaul of Medicare.

Senate Democrats prepared to release their own plan on Wednesday, which would raise new revenues through tax increases and call for new public investment.

As some Republicans left the meeting early, they were not exactly sounding optimistic about a grand compromise.

“Well, he doesn’t want to balance the budget in 10 years, and he wants tax increases and he wants new spending,” said Representative Darrell Issa of California. “But other than that we’re close.”

Mr. Obama spoke for about 25 minutes, before taking questions. Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California, said that military spending did not come up, though he wished it had, and that the president talked about tax reform and said balancing the budget within 10 years was not his top priority.

Other issues that came up, attendees said, included immigration, guns, Israel and the Keystone XL pipeline. Republicans said they left the meeting with the impression that the president was nearing a decision on the pipeline.

A topic on which the group seemed able to reach at least a modicum of compromise was entitlement reform. “He said he’s willing to look at them, without any specifics, if we’re willing to give him what he wants,” said Representative John Carter, Republican of Texas.

White House officials described the meeting as a good one that provided the president a face-to-face opportunity to call on Republicans to compromise on the budget and other issues.

Aides said Mr. Obama was blunt about what has been called his “charm offensive” with Republicans, telling the House Republicans that there is a need to build trust between the two parties.

But he also told lawmakers that he believed there was an opportunity for the White House and Congress to reach agreement on some big, contentious issues, including taxes, immigration and gun control.

White House officials said the president made no new offers on taxes and spending. Instead, he repeated his push for a “grand bargain” that would include tax increases and more spending cuts.

At one point during the meeting, a member of the White House staff interrupted and handed the president a note informing him that a new pope had been chosen. Someone shouted out, “Does this mean White House tours are open?” To which the president responded, “Vatican tours are.”

Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, sounded cautiously optimistic.

The president, he said, “did himself some good.” Mr. Ryan, walking out of the meeting, then joked that the real question he wanted answered was who the new pope was.

The competing budgets and the Republican refusal to entertain additional tax revenues seemed to raise new questions in the president’s mind about whether a broad budget deal was achievable, even before his talk with the House Republicans.

“Ultimately, it may be that the differences are just too wide,” the president said in an interview with ABC that was broadcast Wednesday morning. “It may be that ideologically, if their position is, ‘We can’t do any revenue,’ or, ‘We can only do revenue if we gut Medicare or gut Social Security or gut Medicaid,’ if that’s the position, then we’re probably not going to be able to get a deal.”

In the interview, Mr. Obama also disputed an assertion that has become dogma among House Republicans: that the country faces a debt crisis and must balance its budget. The new House plan sets out to balance the budget within 10 years.

But Mr. Obama played down the idea that the federal debt was crippling the nation.

“We don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt,” Mr. Obama said. He also said that failure to get a big deal would not send the economy into a tailspin.

“That won’t – that won’t create a crisis,” he said on ABC. “It just means that we will have missed an opportunity. I think that opportunity is there and I’m going to – make sure that they know that I’m prepared to – work with them.”

Republican lawmakers quickly disputed the president’s contention that the debt did not represent a crisis, as budget hearings got under way in both houses of Congress.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to say he was “shocked” at the president’s words.

Across the Rotunda in the House, Representative Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, a Republican member of the House Budget Committee, said that if Democrats would not agree to bring the budget into balance, there could be no deal.

“The problem is we have no one to compromise with,” Mr. Duffy said. “If they won’t give us a proposal to balance it, there’s no room for negotiation.”

In a sign of just how different Democratic and Republican priorities are on the budget, House Republicans on Tuesday, led by Mr. Ryan, released their spending plan for the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1. But it would balance the budget primarily by wiping out some of Mr. Obama’s biggest legislative achievements, like his hard-fought victory to require that all Americans have health insurance.

At the same time, Senate Democrats were preparing to lay out their budget on Wednesday, a plan that rejects the Republican vision for greater austerity and includes $100 billion in new stimulus spending.

 Obama to Meet With House G.O.P. Over Budget – NYTimes.com.

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