Obama curtails Asia trip amid US government shutdown

US President Barack Obama on Wednesday scrapped two stops in his long-planned four-nation trip to Asia and left the other two stops in doubt as the US government shutdown entered a second day.

Obama told his counterparts in Malaysia and the Philippines he would not be able to meet them as planned, and a White House official said the president is weighing whether to attend diplomatic summits in Indonesia and Brunei.

"We will continue to evaluate those trips based on how events develop throughout the course of the week," National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

Not only must the president deal with the budget impasse and its effects, but he faces an even bigger crunch in Congress, which will put the United States at risk of defaulting on its debts if it does not raise the US public debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has said the United States will exhaust its borrowing authority no later than 17 October.

The White House announcements about the Asia trip followed a fruitless day on Capitol Hill, with congressional Democrats and Republicans coming no closer to resolving their differences.

According to a BBC correspondent, the Republicans – who have a majority in the house - are backing down, albeit very slowly. First they wanted to stop the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare plan known as Obamacare. Then they sought to delay it. Then to delay a part of it. That is still their position but they have tried to open a few bits of government, like national parks.

The fight between Obama's Democrats and the Republicans over the government's borrowing power is rapidly merging with the standoff over every day funding, which has forced the first government shutdown in 17 years and forced hundreds of thousands of federal employees to take unpaid leave.

While the politics of the shutdown have little interest for average citizens, the threat not to raise the USA's debt ceiling is, according to most economists, so appalling, and so terrible for the world economy, that they can barely think about it.

Obama has accused Republicans of taking the government hostage to sabotage his signature healthcare law, the most ambitious US social programme in five decades, passed three years ago.

Republicans in the House of Representatives view the Affordable Care Act as a dangerous extension of government power, and have coupled their efforts to undermine it with continued efforts to block government funding. The Democratic-controlled Senate has repeatedly rejected those efforts.

The standoff has raised new concerns about Congress's ability to perform its most basic duties and threatens to hamper a still fragile economic recovery.

As police cordoned off landmarks such as the Lincoln Memorial, and government agencies stopped functions ranging from cancer treatments to trade negotiations, Republicans in the House sought to restore funding to national parks, veterans' care and the District of Columbia, the capital.

An effort to pass the three bills fell short on Tuesday evening, but Republicans plan to try again on Wednesday. They are likely to be defeated by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The setback to the Asia trip, designed to reinforce US commitment to the region, is the first obvious international consequence of the troubles in Washington.