Republicans less than convinced by Geithner's push for debt ceiling increase

Can the Democrats really explain why failure to increase the debt limit is so bad? OK, so not increasing the debt limit cuts spending by about one-third in August and September and by about 29 percent for next year.

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), who sat through most of the hour-long meeting, told The Hill that Geithner said “absolutely nothing” to convince him of the urgent need to increase the current $14.3 trillion limit by the August 2 deadline.
If Congress does not raise the borrowing authority for the Treasury secretary by August, Chabot predicted that “we’ll have to reduce the level of spending, which I’m in favor of.”
“It just looks to me like we’re moving towards that [deadline], and the administration just assumes that we’re going to raise it, and they’re sure not going to do it with Republican votes in the House unless there was dramatic changes in the level of spending. And I don’t see this White House being willing to compromise on that,” Chabot said.
In fact, last Tuesday, the House defeated a resolution that would raise the national debt limit by the administration's requested $2.4 trillion without spending cuts or reforms, on a strong bipartisan basis. The resolution failed 97-318. . . .

Geithner didn't exactly produce a lot of credibility when he made obviously false statements.

“There were a lot of groans,” from GOP freshman lawmakers when Geithner told them he didn’t ask for a vote on the doomed resolution, despite the fact that President Obama and Geithner had sent letters to Congress and “made demands” that the legislative branch vote on a clean increase, for months, according to Rep. Frank Guinta (R-N.H.).

Guinta continued, “He backed off on that statement, and he did allude to the fact that that was political in nature. Our response was: ‘no that was not political in nature, you asked for it, the president asked for it, we gave that to you and in a bipartisan fashion Republicans and Democrats said no to a clean raising of the debt ceiling.'” . . .