Boehner Plan Faces G.O.P. Resistance and Veto Threat

WASHINGTON – House Republican leaders Tuesday made increasingly frenzied pleas to their members to approve a plan to temporarily raise the nation’s debt ceiling, but passage seemed in growing doubt and the White House reiterated that it strongly opposed the bill and that President Obama’s advisers would recommend a veto should it somehow pass the House and Senate. Scores of the House’s most conservative members pored over the details presented by the Republican leaders and concluded they did not like what they saw.

In a Tuesday morning meeting, Representative Eric Cantor, the chamber’s majority leader, told fellow Republicans to “stop grumbling and whining and to come together as conservatives and rally behind” the House speaker John Boehner’s plan. But many lawmakers complained that it lacked sufficient spending cuts. As a further blow to its prospects, the Club for Growth, which scores members on their fiscally conservative votes, came out against the plan.

The scramble for votes came as lawmakers’ phone lines and Web sites were overwhelmed in response to President Obama’s plea on Monday night for Americans to call members of Congress and push for a compromise. Across the Capitol in the Senate, the majority leader, Harry Reid, waited for the House to vote – likely on Wednesday – before bringing his own debt legislation to the floor.

President Obama stopped just short of promising to veto the legislation if it reaches his desk in the next week. In a two-sentence message to Congress, the White House said if presented with the measure, “the president’s senior advisors would recommend that he veto this bill," the message said. Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said it was a moot point in any event as the bill could not pass the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats.

“Speaker Boehner’s plan not a compromise,” said Senator Reid, after meeting with Senate Democrats. “It was written for the Tea party and not the American people. Democrats will not vote for it. Democrats will not vote for it. Democrats will not vote for it. It’s dead on arrival in the Senate, if they get it out of the House.”

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, expressed mounting frustration at the various twists and turns and the lobbying going on over the competing bills.

“We have to get a solution,” he said. “Regardless of how the various outside groups are reacting to this, we need to get the job done.”

Although Wall Street analysts and some Republicans expressed doubt that the clock would really run out on Aug. 2, leading to a possible default, the White House said that Treasury’s estimate was not a charade, and that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had already used up all the “wiggle room” for delaying a resolution.

Moody’s Investor Service warned mutual fund clients that the impasse was threatening money market mutual funds.

“Direct risks include the potential for a missed interest or principal payment on government bonds for a short period of time, as well as incremental weakening of the overall credit quality of money-market fund portfolios that have U.S. government exposure," the New York-based ratings company said in a statement.

On Monday, Mr. Boehner rolled out a two-stage deficit reduction plan that would allow the $14.3 trillion federal debt limit to rise immediately by about $1 trillion in exchange for $1.2 trillion in spending cuts. The plan tied a second increase early next year to the ability of a new bipartisan congressional committee to produce more deficit reduction measures. The plan has been rejected by Democrats, who crave a single vote that would raise the limit through 2012.

Phone calls and e-mails to about 25 House members demonstrated that many were still on the fence as they combed the House bill, looking to see if the cuts and future spending caps would pass muster. “The ‘lean no’s’ and undecided are open-minded,” said Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a Republican who does not support the bill. “But the burden of persuasion is pretty high.”

Jackie Calmes and Carl Hulse contributed reporting to this article.