GOP House Speaker Boehner Withdraws From Debt Talks

Politics, Debt and Economy: GOP House Speaker Boehner Withdraws From Debt Talks - CNBC

President Barack Obama said Friday that GOP House Speaker John Boehner told him he "will be walking away" from the debt talks.

AP

The president said this came after he offered to cut discretionary spending by $1 trillion. He said he thought he was offering an "extraordinarily fair" deal.

Obama said he is calling on Boehner and other congressional leaders from both parties for a meeting at the White House at 11 a.m. ET Saturday.

"We have run out of time and they are going to have to explain to me how it is that we are going to avoid default and ask them to do the tough thing but the right thing," the president said.

Earlier, the president said he was prepared to make "tough choices" for a sweeping deficit-reduction deal to avert a U.S. default, despite Democrats warning him not to make too many concessions.

With the deadline to raise the U.S. debt ceiling now just 11 days away, the Democratic president appealed for compromise by both parties as he and the top Republican in Congress, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, pursued a plan for up to $3 trillion in spending cuts.

"I'm willing to sign a plan that includes tough choices I would not normally make, and there are a lot of Democrats and Republicans in Congress who I believe are willing to do the same thing," Obama said at a town hall-style meeting at the University of Maryland.

While an agreement did not look imminent, Obama faced increasingly vocal complaints from his own Democrats on a deal-in-the-making that could mean painful curbs in popular health and retirement programs but no immediate increase in taxes.

"I've never seen frustration higher," Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said after a week of sometimes chaotic efforts to sort through conflicting options and stave off a potentially devastating default on the nation's financial obligations.

Negotiations between Republicans and the White House toward a deal to raise the $14.3 trillion limit on America's borrowing are at a critical phase, with less than two weeks before the world's biggest economy runs out of money to pay its bills.