Democrats insist that Republicans could easily open the government if Boehner simply allows a vote on the emergency spending bill. Democrats argue that their 200 members in the House plus close to two dozen pragmatic Republicans would back a so-called clean bill, but the Speaker remains hamstrung by the conservative tea party wing of the Republican Party.
In a series of Sunday television appearances, Lew warned that on Oct. 17, he exhausts the bookkeeping maneuvers he has been using to keep borrowing.
“I'm telling you that on the 17th, we run out of the ability to borrow, and Congress is playing with fire,” Lew said.
Lew said that while Treasury expects to have $30 billion of cash on hand on Oct. 17, that money will be quickly exhausted in paying incoming bills given that the government's payments can run up to $60 billion on a single day.
Treasury issued a report on Thursday detailing in stark terms what could happen if the government actually defaulted on its obligations to service the national debt.
“A default would be unprecedented and has the potential to be catastrophic,” the Treasury report said. “Credit markets could freeze, the value of the dollar could plummet, U.S. interest rates could skyrocket, the negative spillovers could reverberate around the world.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, a force in pushing Republicans to link changes to the health care law in exchange for keeping the government running, spelled out his conditions for raising the borrowing authority.
“We should look for three things. No. 1, we should look for some significant structural plan to reduce government spending. No. 2, we should avoid new taxes. And No.
3, we should look for ways to mitigate the harms from ‘Obamacare,”' Cruz said, describing the debt ceiling as an issue that is among the “best leverage the Congress has to rein in the executive.”
Boehner and Schumer were interviewed on ABC's “This Week,” and Lew and Cruz on CNN's “State of the Union.” Lew also appeared on CBS' “Face the Nation,” “Fox News Sunday” and NBC's “Meet the Press.”
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