Republicans on Sunday kept up the drumbeat of blame against President Obama his failure to negotiate with them on the fiscal crisis that will come to a head on Thursday, when the government will run out of money to pay its bills.



Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said Obama was to blame for his refusal to deal with the fiscal crisis. “This is the first time in history that a president of the United States has said, ‘Look, I’m not even going to talk about it,’ ” Portman said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He added: “The president should engage. You’ve got to deal with the underlying problem, which is the spending problem.”



On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, played down fears that a default on the debt this week would be the cause of a downgrade of the nation’s credit rating, as happened during a similar showdown in 2011. The downgrade, he said, was not caused by the threat of default, but by the size of the United States’ debt.



“The vast majority of people are afraid of what this growth of our debt is going to do to us,” he said.



Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said “The shutdown will be old news next year. Obamacare’s faults will be front and center in 2014".



Representative John Carter of Texas described Obama as “acting like a royal president.”




http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/us...it-debate.html