President Obama's goal is to make no more concessions to the House GOP on the law. W.H. determined on Obamacare

Don’t blink first.

That’s the strategy President Barack Obama and Capitol Hill Democrats are pursuing as the nation faces a government shutdown, a historic default on its debt and the final phase of Obamacare.


Obama’s domestic agenda — headed up by infrastructure spending, gun control and immigration reform — has long since stalled. Now, with the basic functions of government on the line again, he’s defining his goal as not giving any more ground to House Republicans — no budget cuts and no concessions on the Affordable Care Act or the debt limit.

Obamacare, the crown jewel of the president’s legislative legacy, is truly non-negotiable for the administration, according to Democrats privy to conversations behind closed doors at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

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Rob Nabors, Obama’s deputy chief of staff for policy, told that to House Democratic leaders during a closed-door session on Thursday, according to a Democratic source on Capitol Hill.

“They’re willing to negotiate, but not on ACA,” the source said of Nabors’s message. The bigger problem, the source said, is that “Republicans can’t get their s—t together to sit down and talk.”

With the exception of a Wednesday meeting on the debt limit with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Boehner and his aides haven’t talked fiscal matters with the White House recently, according to Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck. Nabors told House Democrats that there have been no back channel conversations with the speaker.

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The White House position is a defensive posture struck as much out of necessity as from choice, and one that remains unchanged after Washington lost more than two weeks on domestic matters while it was fixated on the Syria crisis. The idea is to prevent further damage to party priorities. Administration officials also believe that Republicans will back down to avoid economic catastrophe and the ensuing political fallout.

“The combination of those two incentives will compel them to come up with a solution,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday. “We have drawn the lines we have drawn, and we’ll see what they produce.”

But Democrats in Congress say they aren’t so sure that the White House is really ready to back up its rhetoric, particularly on a short-term spending bill known as a continuing resolution that would lock in lower spending levels than House Democrats want and take political pressure off of House Republican leaders. While the White House won’t give ground on Obamacare with regard to the CR, House Democratic leaders are far more inclined to let the government shut down over the spending levels or length of the extension than their White House counterparts.

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“Our leadership thinks the time has come to draw a line in the sand, not do a short-term extension,” said a senior Democratic aide. “They’re ready for a flash and a pop.”

Recalling past budget battles, the aide said the administration’s hard line on the CR and the debt limit could move.

“I don’t know that I trust them, because they’ve said that before and it’s changed,” the aide said.

Senate Democratic leaders echoed White House arguments in a Capitol Hill press conference on Thursday, and they feel confident that their solidarity will prevail over a fractured House Republican Conference that just had to pull a stopgap bill to keep the government funded into the fall because it wouldn’t gut Obamacare.

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“The biggest thing has been the uniformity in the refusal to negotiate on the debt ceiling,” said Matt House, the communications director for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “We think at the last minute they’re going to be the ones that have to blink and come to us.”

House Republicans are badly fractured over spending. They can’t agree among themselves on whether to keep spending on its current trajectory, cut it further than the caps agreed to in previous budget deals, or, as a handful of Republicans believe, raise it a little bit. More important at the moment, they are divided over whether to shut down the government in the name of starving Obamacare.

The president mocked that strategy at a press briefing last month.

“The idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million people from getting health care is a bad idea,” Obama said on Aug. 9. He called the GOP’s effort to defund the law a “holy grail” of Republican orthodoxy.

But the warnings from Democrats haven’t stopped hard-liners in the GOP from trying to use the impending shutdown as leverage to crush the health care law.

GOP leaders have proposed tying a one-year delay in Obamacare to the debt ceiling increase rather than dealing with it in the CR. But they’re facing opposition to that tack, too, from within their own ranks.

Rep. Tom Graves, a Georgia conservative, unveiled a bill Thursday that he said would keep the government running for another year by denying funding for Obamacare and delaying the implementation of its provisions until 2015. And he tweaked the White House for bowing to pressure earlier this year to put off for a year the start date of a mandate that employers provide health insurance

“This approach builds upon the Obama administration’s policy of delaying portions of Obamacare and relieves taxpayers of the burden of funding a program that is not being implemented,” Graves said.

It would be one thing if his bill were a one-off complaint about the House GOP leadership’s attempt to keep the government — including Obamacare — funded past Sept. 30. But 42 House Republicans signed onto Graves’s measure before he released it.

House Republican leaders, worried about the political blowback from a government shutdown — particularly one staked to Obamacare — are struggling to find a way to get a CR through the House.

While White House officials say publicly that they won’t negotiate on the debt limit, it is hard to see them turning down a deal that combined both issues if they were pleased with the outcome.

Perhaps that’s why Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has asked colleagues to sign a letter drawing a line on both spending levels and the debt ceiling.

“We absolutely oppose any continuing resolution or appropriations legislation that would increase spending above the levels provided under the Budget Control Act,” Coburn wrote in a draft of the letter. “Furthermore, if Congress cannot keep its word to control spending as agreed to in the bipartisan Budget Control Act, we will not agree to additional increases in the debt limit. We do not need another bipartisan agreement to increase spending and borrowing.”

Edward-Isaac Dovere contributed to this report.