Boehner largely hewed to his talking points Sunday. Boehner: No government shutdown

The sequester is in effect, but House Speaker John Boehner says he won’t force a government shutdown.

Boehner told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview that aired Sunday the House will vote this week to keep the federal government operating through September, when the fiscal year ends, and avoid a potentially politically damaging shutdown.


The move would be the second time since the election that Boehner has avoided a fight, desired by some House conservatives, in order to keep the GOP from possible blame. He led House Republicans to raise the debt ceiling in January to fend off a repeat of the 2011 conflict that led to the sequester.

It also avoids a repeat of the 1995 government shutdown engineered by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, which was widely seen as a disaster for House Republicans.

“The president this morning agreed that we should not have any talk of a government shutdown,” Boehner said in the interview taped Friday. “So I’m hopeful that the House and Senate will be able to work through this.”

Boehner largely hewed to his talking points during the interview, recorded Friday after his White House meeting with President Barack Obama, saying five separate times that he already agreed to allow one tax increase for the president and implied he will concede no more.

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Boehner wouldn’t categorically rule out new tax revenues as part of a future deal but repeated that his focus is on cutting spending.

“I’m going to say it one more time,” Boehner said. “The president got his tax hikes on January the first. The issue here is spending. Spending is out of control. There are smarter ways to cut spending than this silly sequester that the president demanded. And so, we need to address the long-term spending problem. But we can’t cut our way to prosperity.”

But asked about the House GOP’s refusal to consider new federal revenues, Boehner slammed Obama.

“The president got $650 billion of higher taxes on the American people on Jan. 1,” he said. “How much more does he want, one? When is the president going to address the spending side of this?”

Gene Sperling, director of Obama’s National Economic Council, appeared after Boehner on “Meet the Press” and said the speaker will have a deal to keep the government running so long as he doesn’t change his demands.

“What is fair is that if the Republicans stay with their part of the deal — meaning that they put forward a continuing resolution that’s reasonable, not political, stays at the level we agreed to, which is $1.043 trillion — if they agree to that, which they suggested they would, the president doesn’t believe in manufacturing another crisis,” Sperling said. “We would still be committed to trying to find Republicans and Democrats that will work on a bipartisan compromise to eliminate, get rid of the sequester. That’s why the president is calling the leadership on Friday. That’s why he spent Saturday afternoon calling Republican and Democratic senators who he thinks can be part of a caucus of common sense to help move our country forward.”

Sperling said Obama remains open to compromise — and urged Boehner to be, too.

“This really does reflect compromise,” Sperling said of the White House offer. “We’ve already cut the deficit by $2.5 trillion — $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of revenue. Now the president puts an offer to Speaker Boehner on the table in December; even though the speaker walked away from the negotiations, he’s kept that offer on.”

Sperling said Boehner should at least be willing to raise $400 billion in additional tax revenues since he was once open to as much as $1 trillion.

“If he put $1 trillion of revenue on the table 10 weeks ago and $600 billion has been passed, if he was keeping his offer on the table, he would be at least willing to consider $400 billion more as a starting point,” Sperling said.

Boehner also reversed a previous position, saying he is not sure the sequester — which is estimated to cost as many as 700,000 jobs — will be damaging to the economy.

“Listen,” he told NBC’s David Gregory. “I don’t know whether it’s going to hurt the economy or not. I don’t think anyone quite understands how the sequester is really going to work.”

Boehner cited debunked claim s by Education Secretary Arne Duncan that teachers would be laid off in West Virginia as a result of the sequester as evidence of the uncertainty.

But Boehner last month penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he claimed the sequester “threatens U.S. national security, thousands of jobs and more.”

Yet when Gregory asked Boehner about the Journal column, he said only that he is “concerned about its impact on our economy and its impact on our military” before blaming Senate Democrats and Obama for the sequester taking place.

Sperling said the White House has no doubt the sequester will be harmful — which he said will push Republicans to negotiate with Obama on new tax revenues.

“As this pain starts to gradually spread to communities affected by military spending, to children who need mental health services, to people who care about our border security, I believe that more Republican colleagues who are concerned about this harm to their constituents will choose bipartisan compromise on revenue-raising tax reform with serious entitlement reform,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“They’ll choose this bipartisan compromise over what is an ideological position that every single penny of deficit reduction going forward must be on the middle class or seniors or our children and that there can’t be one penny that comes from closing loopholes or tax expenditures,” he added. “That is not a position that the public supports. It’s not the kind of bipartisan compromise we need to move our country forward.”

Boehner said he employed the same talking points during the White House meeting of congressional leaders on Friday that he used with NBC’s Gregory.

“We had a very pleasant meeting, but it was also a very frank meeting,” Boehner said. “I made it clear to the president that again, a trillion dollars worth of tax hikes in Obamacare. And you have another $650 billion worth of tax hikes on January the first. You can’t tax our way out of this problem. We’ve got to deal with the spending side, just like every American family has to.”

Instead, Boehner said, he favors reducing income tax rates as part of a larger reform effort — something Obama is certain to oppose if it includes decreasing tax rates on the wealthy.

“I want tax reform,” he said. “Republicans want tax reform. We want to bring rates down for all Americans so that we’ve got a fairer Tax Code. But to arbitrarily pull out a couple of tax expenditures and to say, ‘Well, we ought to use that to get rid of the sequester.’ Listen, every American knows Washington has a spending problem. Every American, in these tough economic times, has to find a way to balance their budget.”

Kevin Robillard contributed to this report.