Obama Asks Republican to "Stop This Farce".

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama called on Republicans Saturday to “stop this farce” as the US government shutdown entered a fifth day with no signs of an end to the impasse. With public discontent building, the House of Representatives voted 407 to 0 to pass a measure to retroactively pay the hundreds of thousands of government workers furloughed during the crisis. But there were no overt movements by Republicans and Democrats to negotiate a way out of the first federal government shutdown in 17 years, as both sides blamed each other. “Take that vote. Stop this farce. End this shutdown now,” Obama exhorted the Republican-controlled House in his weekly radio and video address. Eric Cantor, the number two Republican in the House, said the impasse could be worked out but Obama “seems to be unwilling to sit down and talk with us.” “It doesn’t make any sense if the president has an ax to grind with the opposing party, why he would want to put the American people in the middle of that,” he said. The US government closed all but its essential operations earlier in the week when Republican lawmakers refused to approve money for government operations without first delaying or defunding the new health care law, commonly known as Obamacare. The US Senate has already approved a budget, and “there are enough Republican and Democratic votes in the House of Representatives willing to do the same, and end this shutdown immediately,” Obama said. “But the far right of the Republican Party won’t let Speaker John Boehner give that bill a yes-or-no vote.” Obama said he “won’t pay a ransom in exchange for reopening the government. And I certainly won’t pay a ransom in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.” Obama is refusing to negotiate with Republicans over the budget issues until they pass a temporary bill to open the government and agree to raise the $16.7 trillion US statutory borrowing limit - without which Washington could default on its debts for the first time ever starting on October 17. “For as reckless as a government shutdown is, an economic shutdown that comes with default would be dramatically worse,” Obama said. But some Republican pragmatists who have signaled they would vote to pass a fresh spending bill worried that such a resolution is no longer achievable. “I think that ship has sailed,” Congressman Michael Grimm said Friday. “We’re getting too close to the debt ceiling vote. It looks like the only thing that’s going to work right now is a dialogue.” Boehner on Friday appeared to be equally frustrated. “This isn’t some damn game,” he said after a news report cited an unnamed official saying that the White House is benefiting from the shutdown. “All we’re asking for is to sit down and have a discussion, reopen the government and bring fairness to the American people under ‘Obamacare,’” Boehner said. Secretary of State John Kerry, travelling in Indonesia, warned Saturday that the political standoff was “reckless” and threatened to weaken the US standing abroad. “If it were prolonged, or repeated, people would begin to question the willingness of the United States to stay the course and its ability to,” Kerry told reporters at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum on the Indonesian island of Bali. “But that’s not the case and I don’t think it will be the case.” Obama had been due to travel to Bali for an APEC leaders’ summit starting Monday, but canceled the trip - which would also have taken him to Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines - to deal with the government shutdown. Kerry, who is filling in for Obama, made it clear he believed that the Republicans blocking government spending were playing a dangerous game. “I think it is reckless, personally, to even provide those moments where you have these risks that are exposed,” Kerry said, referring to areas of spending on global security hotspots that have been suspended because of the shutdown. Kerry also insisted that Obama’s so-called strategic pivot to the Asia-Pacific had not been weakened by the president canceling his trip. Meanwhile Kerry’s predecessor, former secretary of state and possible 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, decried the “scorched earth” tactics in the government shutdown. “We watch what happens in Washington with a certain amount of bewilderment, even disgust,” she said late Friday in a speech at Hamilton College in the town of Clinton, in upstate New York. “The rest of the world watches it closely. When we let partisanship override citizenship, when we fail to make progress on the challenges facing our country, our standing in the world suffers,” Clinton said.