Before Speaker John Boehner’s speech to the Economic Club of New York on Monday night, Senator Charles Schumer hosted a conference call with Roger Altman, urging the speaker to reassure the international credit markets and pledge that House Republicans would raise the nation’s debt ceiling.
Instead, Boehner called for trillions of dollars in cuts. “Without significant spending cuts and changes to the way we spend the American people’s money, there will be no debt limit increase,” he told the crowd.
Schumer responded today, with quotes from a series of stories that criticized Boehner’s reasoning.
“The Speaker is entitled to his own opinions about how to reduce our debt, but not his own facts,” said Schumer, in a statement on the Senate Democrats website. “We will never cure what ails our economy if the Republicans keep misdiagnosing the problem because of their ideological blinders.”
As evidence of how far apart the two sides currently are, Boehner’s office sent out two of the same stories–a Ruth Marcus column calling his remarks “alarming” and a New York Times’ editorial called them “wrongheaded”–with the subject line “Panic: Democrats Fret Over Boehner’s Call for Cutting Spending & Preventing Tax Hikes.”
