On the campaign trail today, Mitt Romney picked up on the Republican party line that it’s President Obama who’s holding up the works on the debt ceiling increase — and that he can end the fight whenever he wants.
Romney didn’t offer any comment on the plan offered by Mitch McConnell that incensed so many conservatives, but he did double-down on his support for the Cut, Cap and Balance plan favored by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and his conservative allies in the GOP.
“It is within the president’s power to say to the leadership in the house and the senate that ‘I’ll cut spending, I’ll cap the amount of spending, and I’ll pursue a balanced budget amendment and if the president were to do that this whole debt limit problem goes away,” Romney told a crowd in Portsmouth, NH Thursday, ABC News reports.
Romney said Cut, Cap and Balance “for me is the line in the sand.”
After spending weeks downplaying the effects of default and months refusing to raise the debt ceiling without White House buy-in to their policy goals, Republicans have pulled a rhetorical about-face in recent days, claiming it’s Obama who’s putting the country on the edge of an economic precipice.
Romney seems ready to grab onto that messaging and run with it, offering up his own version of the Republican refrain: if Obama would just do exactly what we want, there would be no problem with the debt ceiling.
