House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said they would do so in exchange for negotiations with the White House to end a government shutdown that took effect on 1 October.
Republicans will meet Mr Obama, who is a Democrat, later on Thursday.
Officials have warned the US risks default on 17 October if the nation's borrowing limit is not increased.
Mr Boehner told reporters on Thursday: "What we want to do is to offer the president today the ability to move a temporary increase in the debt ceiling in agreement to go to conference on the budget for his willingness to sit down and discuss with us a way forward to reopen the government."
"It's time for leadership," the Ohio Republican said. "It's time for these negotiations and this conversation to begin."
Worker layoffs A spokesman for Mr Boehner told media that the deal on the table ahead of Thursday afternoon's meeting was a "clean" increase of the debt limit, with no additional policies attached.
“Start Quote
The likelihood is that markets around the world would plunge and global interest rates would rise”
It would only last six weeks - until 22 November.
Reacting to the offer, White House press secretary Jay Carney
told a daily media briefing the president was glad that "cooler heads"
seemed to be prevailing in the House.But he added: "He will not pay ransom in exchange for the Republicans in the House doing their job."
It is not clear if Republicans are willing to entirely drop their attempts to defund or delay Mr Obama's 2010 healthcare law - demands which brought about the government shutdown, the first in 17 years.
Democratic finance committee chairman Max Baucus said the Republican campaign to undermine the healthcare law in return for agreeing to end the shutdown was "not up for debate" and would not happen.
“Start Quote
First intelligence from up on the Hill suggests that getting enough Republican votes could be hard”
Hundreds of thousands of federal
employees have been out of work since the shutdown began, and private
firms, from arms makers to motels, have begun to lay off workers. Mr Obama met House Democrats at the White House on Wednesday and told them he would prefer a longer-term increase to the nation's $16.69 trillion (£10.47 trillion) debt ceiling.
'Chaos' But the president said he was willing to accept a short-term rise in the borrowing cap to "give Boehner some time to deal with the Tea Party wing of his party", Representative Peter Welch told the Associated Press news agency after the meeting.
Dow Jones Industrial Average
Last Updated at 10 Oct 2013, 18:52 GMT *Chart shows local time
| value | change | % |
|---|---|---|
| 15032.81 |
+
+229.83
|
+
+1.55
|
Top winner and loser |
||
Unitedhealth Group Inc. |
||
| 73.62 |
+
+2.24
|
+
+3.14
|
Hewlett-Packard Co. |
||
| 22.34 |
-
-0.26
|
-
-1.15
|
The stalemate has harmed the approval
ratings of both Democrats and Republicans, but the Republicans'
popularity has taken the worst hit and is now at a record low of 28%,
according to a Gallup poll.
Earlier, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told a congressional
panel that skipping a payment on US debt would trigger a potentially
profound financial crisis."It would be chaos," Mr Lew told the Senate hearing.
Since the US hit its debt ceiling in May, the Treasury has been using what are called extraordinary measures to keep paying the bills, but those methods will be exhausted by 17 October, Mr Lew has said.
The senior Republican on the panel, Senator Orrin Hatch, accused the Obama administration of "an apparent effort to whip up uncertainty in the markets".
But International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde warned that failure by Washington to raise the federal debt ceiling would wreak serious damage on the US and global economies.
The impasse over the debt limit has already rattled markets and increased the interest rate for one-month US Treasury bills. Stocks began to rebound on Thursday on news of a possible breakthrough.
US government shutdown - who's affected?
na wa oh so us still get economic problem
ReplyDelete