hour. the details just coming in. an awol muslim american soldier now in custody in texas found with what the fbi is now saying is a large amount of bomb-making material near ft. hood. barbara starr is all over the story and will join nus a few minutes. first, debt debate but no deal. it all comes down to numbers. i don t mean 13-digit numbers with dollar signs in front of them. i mean this number. take a look here. five days until the treasury says it will run out of borrowed money. five hours, give or take, until the house votes on the so-called boehner plan, and it needs 217 votes to pass, and it s a slam dunk, right? wrong. 60 republicans are tea party members that want huge cuts in spending and no hike in the debt ceiling. here is where the big numbers come in. the republican speaker has staked his leadership on the plan to let the treasury borrow $900 billion right away, while cutting $915 billion in future spending. contrast that with the senate plan from majority lead
getting the mage? we ve got new polling that says all of that. and this is important. recent polling may also explain why we haven t got an deal yet. we ll tell you what we re talking about. in any case, americans are speaking out today. good morning, speaker boehner s office. how may i help you? a summer avalanche of phone calls hitting the capitol. president obama asked for it in his address to the nation last night. here it is. house switchboard today getting nearly double the volume of normal phone calls, house speaker baine er s office reporting as many as 300 people on hold for as long as an hour. online the same story. site unavailable. server busy. we found better than one in three congressional web sites either slow or down entirely from all the volume. also multiple calls to the white house switchboard by one of our producers also not getting through. that s what s happening. and it s unusual. and there s new polling out there on the debt issue from pew research
nation last night. two men and two parties clearly are not on the same page. it s possible they re not even reading from the same book. here s the president, the speaker of the house and then a quick word from cnn s senior political analyst david gergen. temporarily raise the debt ceiling will force us once again to face the threat of default just six months from now. in other words, it doesn t solve the problem. i want you to know that i made a sincere effort to work with the president. in a manner that could secure bipartisan support and be signed into law. and i ll tell you, i gave it my all. unfortunately, the president would not take yes for answer. even when we thought that we might be close to an agreement, the president s demands changed. you got the two plans that are out there. are ultimately horses that you can ride all of the way to the finish line and the issue becomes, what comes after them? and can you get it done before monday or tuesday next week? i i t
i m christine romans. house speaker john boehner says no way to the president s plan. he has another solution and it s simply says, spend less. i m ali velshi. congressional websites crash. what president obama said that had a number of websites going off-line. details coming up on this american morning. thanks for being with us. tuesday, july 26th. welcome to american morning. we all stayed up later than usual last night to get a chance to hear from the president about this debt ceiling showdown as well as from the house speaker. and still divided this morning. they are still divided with different plans, different ideas how to get us out of the mess. didn t you both think maybe they got something, something happened. i didn t think there was a deal. i m always the optimist. lots of ideas, plans, but no agreement. start there with the debt crisis looming, president obama, house speaker john boehner took their cases for getting a deal done directly to the
on this debate before it s too late. and a disturbing new study revealing a widening gap between minorities and the wealthiest americans in the wake of a devastating recession. i m wolf blitzer here in the situation room. first to what many say is shaping up to be an economic disaster of nearly unprecedented proportions if congress doesn t break the deadlock and agree on a deal to raise the debt ceiling only six days from now. the white house warning today there s no more wiggle room and beyond that date, quote, we lose our capacity to borrow. if that happens, interest rates could go up, the value of the dollar could go down. individual mortgages, car loans, student loans, and a lot more could likely suffer significantly, becoming more significant. some financial analysts are even warning of a potential stock market crash. all of that could push the united states into another great recession. let s go straight to capitol hill. our congressional correspondent kate baldwin is j