Obama invites House Republican leaders over for lunch

President Obama will host House Republican leaders for lunch on Wednesday, one week before the White House releases its budget recommendations that will frame the partisan debate in Washington.

Obama’s invitation to House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy comes days after a previously unannounced lunch between the president and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last Friday.

“The president will have a chance to talk through with them many of the things that he outlined in the State of the Union. And I have no doubt that they have their cares and concerns as well,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said at his Tuesday afternoon briefing.

Democrats and Republicans have been girding for a major showdown over spending, ahead of an expected vote on raising the nation’s debt limit. GOP leaders appear set on a strategy to extract steep spending cuts in exchange for acquiescing on the debt ceiling vote.

By holding the debt ceiling hostage to spending reductions, Boehner may be able to achieve an approximation of the GOP’s preferred budget cuts that he could not otherwise deliver in a divided Congress.

In his address to Congress last month, Obama pledged to do his part to restore civility to the debate in the capital. A year earlier, he had promised monthly bipartisan gatherings at the White House, something that did not come to pass.

“I think the president, as you heard him say at the beginning of the lame-duck session, [said] that we needed to better reach out and have those discussions. And I think this is certainly part of that,” Gibbs said of Wednesday’s lunch.

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Boehner, said the Ohio Republican “is pleased to have an opportunity to speak with the president about our plans to reduce economic uncertainly and create jobs by cutting spending and breaking down barriers to private-sector investment.”

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