House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and President Barack Obama exchanged harsh words Tuesday during White House debt-limit talks designed to find common ground on a package of policies that could grease the skids for a politically unpopular increase in the government’s borrowing authority.
Obama managed to drive a wedge deeper into the fragile relationship between Cantor and the House’s top Republican, Speaker John Boehner.
Cantor, according to several sources, told the president he was none-too-pleased that the details of a private presentation he made to White House officials and congressional leaders on Monday had leaked into the media. Democrats, he charged, had asked him to put together a list of spending cuts and revenue-raisers discussed by Vice President Joe Biden’s deficit-reduction working group, only to take his work product and release it publicly.
By contrast, he said, the president hadn’t committed his own plan to paper in the same way.
But Obama had a pointed retort, sources told POLITICO: The president had shown Boehner a written set of specific proposals and assumed that, by doing so, he was sharing his ideas for a $4 trillion “grand bargain” with Cantor and the rest of the House Republican Conference.
Obama’s reply sought to exploit an existing point of tension between Cantor and Boehner, who hadn’t kept the House’s No. 2 Republican in the loop. While Obama and Boehner met secretly — and top aides to both men plotted a possible deal — Cantor was in the dark.
“We are told that the President is incorrect and there have been no details of the President’s preferred plan put on paper, and the Majority Leader is again requesting that those details be released so that we can share them with our Members,” a Cantor spokesperson said Tuesday evening.
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