Boehner Debt Bill Passes House; Obama Urges Bipartisan Deal

"This assurance is the only thing the President and Senate Democrats are holding out for right now," McConnell said. "The Democrats can try to justify their opposition to the House bill any way they want. They can claim they're worried about a stalemate six months from now. They can ignore the fact that of the 31 times Congress and the President have raised the debt limit over the past 25 years, 22 of those debt limit increases lasted less than a year. Why? To make the President's reelection campaign a little bit easier."

However, Reid has said the House bill will be "dead on arrival" in the Senate because Democrats will not pass it in its current form. Reid is weighing when to introduce his bill to raise the debt ceiling.

Unlike Obama, who refrained from using the term "Tea Party," Reid has been more outspoken in blaming that political group of freshmen House Republicans for the nation's debt ceiling woes.

"Five days remain until a few extremist Republicans drive our economy off a cliff because they are too radical and inexperienced to compromise," Reid said Thursday on the Senate floor. "Financial experts are begging Congress to come to an agreement that averts a first-ever default on this nation's financial obligations. It won't be long, they say, before financial markets severely react to continued stubbornness by Tea Party Republicans, tanking our economy."

In his Friday remarks, Obama warned that if the government failed to reach an agreement by Tuesday, the United States would lose its triple-A credit rating, which would result in an effective tax increase on all Americans in the form of increased borrowing costs on loans, mortgages and credit cards. Without a deal, he added, Social Security payments, government contracts with businesses and veterans benefits were all at risk.

The problem is that the U.S. government "doesn't have a political system to match our triple-A credit rating," Obama said. While he is willing to debate budget cuts to avert a U.S. debt default, he said, those cuts should not be tied to raising the debt ceiling.

"There are plenty of ways out of this mess, but we are running out of time," Obama said, pointing to the Tuesday deadline of Aug. 2, when the United States would experience its first-ever default on the nation's financial obligations.

Obama repeated his appeal to the American public, first made in his Monday night address to the nation, to keep up the pressure on elected officials—in phone calls and emails and on Twitter—to come to a bipartisan agreement.