WASHINGTON (Reuters) – John Boehner, the top U.S. Republican, is being upstaged in the battle to raise the debt limit by his younger and more partisan deputy, Eric Cantor, who is widely seen as wanting his job.

In recent days, Cantor has established himself as a lead negotiator in White House talks, willing to tangle with President Barack Obama while Boehner sits relatively mum.

Cantor helped nix a potential deal last week between Boehner and Obama that Democrats said was expected to feature $3 trillion in spending cuts and perhaps up to nearly $1 trillion in new tax revenue.

“Boehner is hearing Cantor’s footsteps,” said a veteran Republican lawmaker, asking not to be identified by name. “And those footsteps are getting louder.”

Cantor seems more attuned than Boehner to overall wishes of House Republicans, many of whom are aligned with the anti-tax Tea Party movement that considers “compromise” a dirty word.

A veteran House Republican said, “It’d be naive not to think that Cantor would like, some day, to become House speaker. A lot depends on how all this works out. It’s defining debate.”

Boehner, 61, and Cantor, 48, the House majority leader deny any friction say they have a strong relationship built largely on mutual opposition to tax hikes.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama and top U.S. lawmakers fell short on Monday of finding enough spending cuts for a deal to avoid an August 2 debt default and Republicans came under fresh pressure to agree to tax hikes.

The two sides achieved no breakthrough in a roughly 90-minute meeting and scheduled a third straight day of talks for Tuesday. This came after Obama, at a news conference, declared it is time for both Republicans and Democrats to “pull off the Band-aid, eat our peas” and make sacrifices.

“If not now, when?” Obama said.

Democrats familiar with the White House talks said that in the meeting, Democratic lawmakers indicated there would not be votes from their side for a deficit-reduction bill that only had spending cuts, as Republicans want.

They said Obama’s view was that without tax increases, the package would at best be little more than $1.5 trillion (943.0 billion pounds) in deficit reduction, far short of the estimated $2 trillion needed to extend the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling through the end of 2012.

“It’s just the math,” one Democratic official told reporters. “You can’t get something through the United States House (of Representatives) without a significant number of Democrats.”

The Treasury Department has warned it will run out of money to cover the country’s bills if Congress does not increase its borrowing authority by August 2. Failure to act could push the United States back into recession, send shock waves through global markets and threaten the dollar’s reserve status.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama and top U.S. lawmakers fell short on Monday of finding enough spending cuts for a deal to avoid an August 2 debt default and Republicans came under fresh pressure to agree to tax hikes.

The two sides achieved no breakthrough in a roughly 90-minute meeting and scheduled a third straight day of talks for Tuesday. This came after Obama, at a news conference, declared it is time for both Republicans and Democrats to “pull off the Band-aid, eat our peas” and make sacrifices.

“If not now, when?” Obama said.

Democrats familiar with the White House talks said that in the meeting, Democratic lawmakers indicated there would not be votes from their side for a deficit-reduction bill that only had spending cuts, as Republicans want.

They said Obama’s view was that without tax increases, the package would at best be little more than $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, far short of the estimated $2 trillion needed to extend the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling through the end of 2012.

“It’s just the math,” one Democratic official told reporters. “You can’t get something through the United States House (of Representatives) without a significant number of Democrats.”

The Treasury Department has warned it will run out of money to cover the country’s bills if Congress does not increase its borrowing authority by August 2. Failure to act could push the United States back into recession, send shock waves through global markets and threaten the dollar’s reserve status.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – As a freshman senator, Republican Pat Toomey punches above his weight in the high-stakes fight over increasing the U.S. debt limit.

To cheers and jeers, Toomey — a Tea Party favorite and Wall Street veteran — dismisses as an exaggeration worries about a short-term debt default and wants the Constitution changed to require a balanced federal budget.

Toomey’s stance has won over enough Republicans — some 20 in the Senate and more than 100 in the House of Representatives — to create a potential bloc able to sway talks this weekend between President Barack Obama and leaders in Congress.

“Those numbers lurk like a black cloud over negotiations,” Ethan Siegal of the Washington Exchange, a private firm that tracks Congress and the White House for investors, said of the bloc that includes many Tea Party movement-backed Republicans who have resisted compromise on the debt ceiling.

Obama and congressional leaders ordered staff to work through the weekend toward a possible agreement to trim the massive U.S. deficit, raise the U.S. debt limit and avoid default by an August 2 deadline.

With the White House warning of dire economic consequences of a default, the president and congressional leaders are to meet on Sunday to discuss progress.

Toomey will not be in the room, but his views will be.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican Senator John McCain, his party’s 2008 presidential nominee, ripped into the current crop of Republican White House contenders, accusing them of breaking party tradition by preaching “isolationism.”

McCain said if former President Ronald Reagan were still alive he would have been disappointed in last week’s Republican presidential debate in which candidates voiced impatience with U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya.

“He would be saying: That’s not the Republican Party of the 20th century, and now the 21st century. That is not the Republican Party that has been willing to stand up for freedom for people for all over the world,” McCain said.

McCain made the comments in an interview with ABC’s “This Week” program that was broadcast on Sunday.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who was one of McCain’s top advisers in the 2008 campaign, echoed McCain’s concerns.

Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” if he’s fearful “that there is an isolationist streak now running now through the Republican Party, Graham said, “Yes.”

“If you think the pathway to the GOP (Republican) nomination in 2012 is to get to Barack Obama’s left on Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, you are going to meet a lot of headwinds,” Graham said.

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama and Republican leader John Boehner will hit the golf course on Saturday with many hoping that over 18 holes they can knock Washington’s troubled debt limit talks out of the rough.

Obama and Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, will play golf together for the first time and discuss how to reach a deal to raise the country’s $14.3 trillion debt limit by Aug. 2 to avoid the first default in U.S. history.

U.S. presidents have been playing golf with friends and foes for years. They often find it a good way to talk candidly and — between putts and drives, shanks and hooks — unearth some common ground, apart from divots.

“It is an important time to relax and talk — as long as you aren’t hitting it into the rough all day — and do deals,” said James Thurber of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.

Democratic and Republican aides say any debt limit deal will ultimately have to be forged by Obama and Boehner, and the golf game is the first major step by them to open lines of communication in negotiations in which the two sides are sharply divided over how to reduce the country’s huge deficits.

“It is an opportunity for me and John to talk about some issues that are of importance to the American people,” Obama said of the golf game in a television interview.

Obama and Boehner will be joined in their game at a yet-to-be-disclosed golf course in the Washington area by Vice President Joe Biden and Ohio Republican Governor John Kasich.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The top Republican in the Congress Tuesday joined a growing chorus of bipartisan calls for Democratic lawmaker Anthony Weiner to resign in the face of an Internet sex scandal.

A day after the House of Representatives granted Weiner a two-week leave of absence to receive unspecified professional help, House Speaker John Boehner said simply, “Yes,” when asked by reporters if the 46-year-old liberal should step down.

Weiner has defied calls from leaders of both parties to relinquish his $174,000-a-year job after his belated admission last week that he sent online messages and lewd photos of himself to at least a half dozen women and lied about it.

Democrats say Weiner has become a troublesome distraction for their party as it gets ready to try to win back the House from Republicans in next year’s election.

Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, 35, a senior aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is expected to return Wednesday from a trip to Africa with Clinton.

“His wife is coming back, and the message is loud and clear that he has to go,” a senior Democratic aide said. “The sooner the better.”

House Democrats have options to try to increase pressure on Weiner — such as passing a non-binding resolution urging him to go, booting him from their caucus or even removing him from the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The top Republican in the Congress Tuesday joined a growing chorus of bipartisan calls for Democratic lawmaker Anthony Weiner to resign in the face of an Internet sex scandal.

A day after the House of Representatives granted Weiner a two-week leave of absence to receive unspecified professional help, House Speaker John Boehner said simply, “Yes,” when asked by reporters if the 46-year-old liberal should step down.

Weiner has defied calls from leaders of both parties to relinquish his $174,000-a-year job after his belated admission last week that he sent online messages and lewd photos of himself to at least a half dozen women and lied about it.

Democrats say Weiner has become a troublesome distraction for their party as it gets ready to try to win back the House from Republicans in next year’s election.

Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, 35, a senior aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is expected to return Wednesday from a trip to Africa with Clinton.

“His wife is coming back, and the message is loud and clear that he has to go,” a senior Democratic aide said. “The sooner the better.”

House Democrats have options to try to increase pressure on Weiner — such as passing a non-binding resolution urging him to go, booting him from their caucus or even removing him from the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama ramped up pressure on Monday on Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner to step down, calling his Internet sex scandal a distraction from the work that Washington needs to get done.

“I can tell you that if it was me, I would resign,” Obama told NBC News shortly before the House of Representatives, without opposition, granted Weiner a two-week leave of absence while the New York congressman gets professional treatment.

Weiner, 46, has defied mounting calls from other leaders of his own party to step down after his belated admission last week that he sent online messages and lewd photos of himself to at least a half dozen women and lied about it.

Weiner’s refusal to resign has angered Democrats, who say his inappropriate online exchanges with women have hurt the party as it looks ahead toward next year’s elections when it will seek to win back the House from Republicans.

The congressman said through an aide over the weekend that rather than immediately step down he would seek a leave of absence from the House and treatment at an undisclosed facility.

“We think this is a distraction obviously from the important business that this president needs to conduct and Congress needs to conduct,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One as Obama headed to North Carolina to talk to business leaders about invigorating the conomy.

Later Monday, Obama told NBC, when asked about Weiner, “Public service is exactly that, it’s a service to the public.”