Republicans press Obama on spending

WASHINGTON — Top House Republicans pressed President Barack Obama Wednesday for a detailed plan on budget cuts, and one leading lawmaker accused him of distorting a GOP Medicare proposal at the center of the partisan divide over spending.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said the meeting was productive despite the absence of any signs of progress. He also made clear that Obama has no intention of letting up on his assertions that Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to send future Medicare recipients into the private insurance marketplace will "end Medicare as we know it."

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, second from right, accompanied by, from left: House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy of Calif.; House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Va.; and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., leave the White House in Washington, Wednesday, after their meeting with President Barack Obama regarding the debt ceiling.

"He doesn't believe that we need to end Medicare as we know it," Carney said at a White House briefing, about an hour after the East Room meeting between Obama and House Republicans.

The White House session came as the GOP sought to build pressure on Obama for trillions in spending cuts in exchange for any increase in the government's ability to borrow.

Afterward, dozens of rank-and-file GOP lawmakers streamed out of the front door of the White House and into a caravan of blue buses waiting for them on Pennsylvania Avenue, while members of the GOP leadership stopped on the driveway to speak to reporters and camera crews awaiting them in under a steaming sun.

"Any day Republicans and Democrats are actually having a dialogue, this is a good thing, said Republican Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas.

Yet it was hard to see any concrete progress from a meeting that, based on descriptions by both sides, amounted to a face-to-face recitation of each side's positions, but no breakthrough on how to reach a debt-reduction deal. The talks came as an Aug. 2 deadline approaches for the federal government to raise the debt limit or go into unprecedented default.

"Unfortunately what we did not hear from the president is a specific plan of his to deal with the debt crisis," Hensarling said. Instead, according to a GOP official briefed on the meeting, Obama noted that he's deputized Vice President Joe Biden to lead talks on deficit reduction.

"This is a large meeting and this is not the forum for specific advances in the negotiations. ... And yet it was productive," Carney said.