US President Barack Obama hoped on Thursday to avoid a new round of brinkmanship within months, after a temporary truce between Republicans and Democrats over the latest shutdown.
US President Barack Obama hoped on Thursday to avoid a new round of brinkmanship within months, after a temporary truce between Republicans and Democrats over the latest shutdown.
In trying to heal the wounds of the last two weeks of political drama, Obama said the crisis had left "no winners" in Washington, warning that America's political dysfunction had encouraged its enemies and dismayed its friends.
There's been a lot of discussion lately of the politics of this shutdown," Obama told an audience of returning executive branch workers in the State Dining Room of the White House.
"Let's be clear. There are no winners here."
The president called on warring politicians to come together to pass a long-term budget and to give up the "brinkmanship" that threatens the economy and squandered the trust of the American people.
He spoke less than 11 hours after signing legislation that ended a 16-day government shutdown and a showdown over raising his government's borrowing authority.
The bill brought a temporary end to a stand-off that had threatened to pitch theUS economy into a historic default.
Obama urged Congress, specifically Republicans in the House of Representatives, to pass stalled bills on agriculture and on reforming America's immigration system.
"Probably nothing has done more damage to America's credibility in the world, our standing with other countries, than the spectacle that we've seen these past several weeks," he said.
"It's encouraged our enemies, it's emboldened our competitors and depressed our friends who look to us for steady leadership."
The president implicitly warned to conservative "Tea Party" Republicans to stop using their most potent weapons -- threatening to halt US debt payments and withholding government funding.
"There's no good reason why we can't govern responsibly, despite our differences, without lurching from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis," he said.
"If you don't like a particular policy or a particular president, then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building."
