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White House calls on Boehner to hold vote on 'clean' funding bill
By Tom Curry, National Affairs Writer, NBC News

White House officials on Sunday pushed back on House Speaker John Boehner’s assertion that the Republican-controlled lower chamber could not pass a government spending bill or raise the debt ceiling without concessions from Democrats.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Boehner continued to assert that a stopgap government funding measure would not pass the House without GOP supported provisions like delaying the implementation of President Barack Obama’s health care law.

But top Obama administration officials said Boehner is wrong and called on the Republican leader to schedule a vote.

“We think that [Boehner’s comment] is not true and Boehner should put it on the floor and give it an up or down vote,” a senior administration official told NBC News.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer also tweeted at Boehner, demanding him to call for a vote to prove there were not enough votes to pass a bill that would end the government shutdown.

Can GOP end the shutdown now? Maybe not

Also on Sunday, the Ohio Republican said he’d insist on negotiations with Obama on some spending cuts as a precondition for the House to vote to raise the debt limit. “I'm not going to raise the debt limit without a serious conversation about dealing with problems that are driving the debt up,” he said.

“We're not going to pass a ‘clean’ debt limit increase,” he said, meaning that he’ll attach spending cuts or other policy changes to the bill to increase debt limit. “I told the president, there's no way we're going to pass one. The votes are not in the House to pass a clean debt limit. And the president is risking default by not having a conversation with us.”

Boehner told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that “every president in modern history has negotiated over a debt limit. Debt limits have been used to force big policy changes in Washington. And guess what, George? They're going to be used again.”

He said he is “ready for the phone call” from Obama or another Democratic leader. “I'm ready for a conversation. I'll take anybody on the Democrats' side who wants to seriously sit down and begin to work out this problem. I'm a reasonable guy.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that it would be “very dangerous” for Congress to not vote to raise the government’s debt limit before the authority to borrow runs out in about ten days.

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