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Congress: No, I won't back down…

Speaker Boehner is refusing to budge to end the shutdown: "I don't want the United States to default on its debt," the Ohio Republican said on ABC's This Week. "But I'm not going to raise the debt limit without a serious conversation about dealing with problems that are driving the debt up."

Washington Post: "House Speaker John A. Boehner on Sunday defiantly rejected calls to reopen the government and raise the federal debt limit, warning that the nation is headed for a first-ever default unless President Obama starts negotiating with Republicans. 'That’s the path we’re on,' Boehner (R-Ohio) said on ABC’s 'This Week.' Of Obama, he added: 'He knows what my phone number is. All he has to do is call.'"

MSNBC: "Now on day six of a government shutdown, Boehner repeated that he wouldn’t bring a clean government spending bill to the floor. 'There are not the votes in the House to pass a clean CR,' he insisted...A number of House Republicans have signaled their willingness to vote for a clean spending bill in order to end the shutdown. Based on an independent analysis by the NBC News Hill team, as many as 22 House Republicans have indicated they would support a clean CR. That means if all 200 Democrats voted in favor, it could pass."

Even though a majority of the House would vote for a clean CR, Roll Call notes, “The GOP’s moderate revolt is sounding more like a moderate whimper.”

National Journal: "The speaker has not had an abundance of opportunities to explain himself to the public during the current shutdown fiasco. Sunday's interview was his first on network T.V. since the shutdown began. That's obviously at least in part by his own choice. But the result is a foggy image of who the speaker is, what he really wants, and what he'd be willing to do to find a deal to reopen the government and prevent a debt default later this month."

Politico: "The government shutdown is lurching into a second week after a fruitless weekend on Capitol Hill. A rare Saturday session was dominated by now-familiar shutdown messaging from Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate, with each side trying to blame the other for keeping the government shuttered. Even House-passed legislation that would pay federal workers prompted an angry reaction from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. There were no signs of serious negotiations over the weekend, and the longer the standoff drags on the more likely the fight will bump up against the Oct. 17 deadline to raise the debt ceiling — setting the stage for a giant battle over fiscal policy in the coming weeks."

“Senior Republicans were for ‘clean’ CRs before they were against them,” Roll Call writes. “Conservative Republicans have been pushing ‘automatic’ continuing resolutions going back at least to the 1995-96 government shutdown era. The idea was popular on the right because an automatic freeze of government spending would take a shutdown off the table, lessening the leverage appropriators had to increase spending or include extraneous items. Indeed, a GOP bill — now sponsored by leadership’s sophomore darling James Lankford of Oklahoma, and once sponsored by the likes of Reps. Jeb Hensarling of Texas and Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and former Sen. Jim DeMint — would automatically fund 100 percent of the government for 120 days in the absence of appropriations bills. The bill would be “clean” in that it wouldn’t have any riders. But after 90 days, it would cut government by 1 percent for every 90 days there aren’t appropriations bills.”

There’s always something… USA Today: “Temporary spending bills approved by the House of Representatives and the Senate include measures that would require the Obama administration to rescind strict new rules on the poultry industry. Advocates for independent chicken farmers want lawmakers to drop the language, which had been sought by poultry processors and their trade groups. The rules give farmers more clout in their business dealings with the processors.”

David Hawkings: “The first high-profile oral argument of the new Supreme Court term comes Tuesday morning in a campaign finance case officially called McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. Across the street, the dispute may come to be known instead as McConnell v. Donation Limits. Mitch McConnell is guaranteed to make the news almost every day as the Senate minority leader. That’s even been true this fall, when the complexities of his squeezed-on-both-sides campaign for re-election in Kentucky have distracted him from (or prompted him to cede) his customary role as the indispensable dealmaker.”