Rep. Hoyer says no Democrat will support House budget bill

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Thursday that no Democrat would support the House Republican Budget Control Act later in the afternoon, because it was drafted without any Democratic input.

“There will in fact be bipartisan opposition to this bill, but there, I predict, will be no Democrat [voting] for this bill, because bipartisanship was not sought,” Hoyer said on the House floor.

{mosads}“There is no common ground here, nor was it sought,” Hoyer said at the start of his remarks. Hoyer was the first Democrat to speak in the planned two-hour debate on the bill.

“We find ourselves in an unprecedented place today,” he said. “Americans stand on the brink of default. It stands there, my friends, because the leadership of this House has failed to act in a timely and responsible way.”

He added that the prospect of default is an “unprecedented status for America, an intolerable place, and Americans are understandably outraged at the politically caused impasse that confronts us.”

Hoyer said failure to reach a compromise would lead to a “wound to the global economy, to jobs across this country, to our standing among nations, that wound will be entirely self-inflicted.”

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“It cannot and must not come to that.”

Hoyer closed by calling on members to reject the bill and work on a new path forward, with just five days left before the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline.

“Each of us … [has] a duty to end this impasse,” he said. “Let’s live up to that duty by voting down this partisan legislation, and then let’s come together on a balanced, bipartisan solution to reduce the deficit and pay our bills.”

House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) spoke just before Hoyer, and argued that the GOP bill was the “closest thing” to a bipartisan plan, as it is based on earlier talks with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

“This one was — by and large, even though it does not have the support of Senator Reid any longer — was put together based on the discussions [Republicans had with Reid],” he said.

Earlier, Republicans chided the Obama White House for failing to come up with any plan, and said it remains unclear whether the Senate could pass any budget plan at all.