President Barack Obama urged Congress to turn to matters like immigration reform yesterday as Washington picked up the pieces from a destructive fiscal crisis that has slowed the US economy and undermined the country’s international standing.
Less than 12 hours after he signed a Bill that ended a 16-day partial government shutdown and averted a catastrophic default, Obama yesterday said lawmakers must stop lurching from crisis to crisis and seek common ground on issues that also include farm policy and long-term budget issues.
“All my friends in Congress have to understand that how business is done in this town has got to change. Because we’ve all got a lot of work to do,” he said at the White House.
On Capitol Hill, Republican and Democratic negotiators held their first meeting to discuss the long-term budget fixes that have proven elusive over the past three years. The panel is supposed to reach agreement by December 13, but there are no guarantees it will succeed where similar efforts have failed.
Obama spoke one day after the Democratic-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a last-minute Bill that will fund the government through to January 15 and extend its borrowing authority until February 7, though the Treasury Department may be able to delay the day of reckoning for several weeks after that date.
The Bill amounts to a clear defeat for the Republicans, who had sought to tie government funding to measures that would undercut Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act.
That effort failed, and the standoff diverted public attention away from the administration’s sloppy rollout of the health law’s online insurance exchanges.
The fight split the Republican party into factions and left it on the wrong side of public opinion. Though Obama’s approval rating fell during the crisis, polls showed that most voters blamed Republicans for the standoff.
Republican Representative Tom Cole from Oklahoma, who will try to hammer out a budget deal with Democrats in the coming months, said it is time to move on.
“We’ve had the fight,” he said on MSNBC. “Now it’s time to get down and identify the things we can agree on.”
US stocks edged higher as investors returned to evaluating companies rather than Washington’s budget wrangling.
The S&P 500 index fell as much as four per cent during the standoff but is now nearly back to the record high it reached on September 18.