Report: WH Will Reject GOP Stopgap

Sam Stein at the Huffington Post reports:

Congressional GOP leaders said on Tuesday that the Obama administration has informed them that it will oppose a last-ditch stopgap funding measure proposed by House Republicans to keep the government running for an additional week.

The Obama administration would neither confirm nor deny the reports. “That is getting ahead of the process,” Press Secretary Jay Carney said, when asked about a one-week continuing resolution. “We believe that we can reach an agreement on funding for the full year if we sit around the table with good faith efforts to approach this in a reasonable way.”

That said, on Tuesday morning, GOP lawmakers and aides from both parties on the Hill said that the administration had made its opposition to the measure clear.

“The White House has indicated now that they have already rejected that notion, which is raising the risk of government shutdown,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told reporters. “We in the House have said consistently that we don't want to shut government down, we just want to decrease spending."

The stopgap measure, which would have cut $12 billion in government spending while funding the Pentagon for the remainder of the fiscal year, was pitched by GOP leadership as a mechanism to at least prolong negotiations over a long-term continuing resolution. But it was written, largely, on the Republican leadership’s terms and ignored repeated statements from the White House expressing concern about funding the government on one or two-week aliquots.