Thread: House GOP leadership plans votes on a series of piecemeal bills to fund government

House GOP leadership sources tell CNN they plan votes on a series of piecemeal bills to fund the government, beginning today.

House GOP to move piecemeal funding bills


By Russell Berman - 10/01/13 03:03 PM ET

House Republicans on Tuesday will move to re-open small portions of the federal government, bringing up bills to fund the National Park Service, part of the Department of Veterans Affairs and operations for the District of Columbia.

Party leaders announced the plan to their members during a closed-door meeting at the Capitol on Tuesday afternoon, some 13 hours after the federal government shut down amid a budget impasse. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his team are trying to deflect blame for the shutdown and show that Republicans are still doing their part to keep open important parts of the government.
The House is expected to vote early Tuesday evening on three separate bills, which would come to the floor under a suspension of the rules and require a two thirds majority to pass. That would mean the measures would need significant Democratic support and would allow Republicans to blame Democrats if they failed.
“President Obama and Senator Harry Reid would rather shut down the government than engage in talks to end special treatment for the well connected under ObamaCare,” a House GOP leadership aide said. “Closed parks and delayed veterans benefits can be easily remedied and allow us to remain focused on forcing the Senate to finally come to the table and talk with us.”
Earlier Tuesday, House Republicans held a photo-op with their appointees to a conference committee they want the Senate to join as a way of resolving the impasse over a stopgap spending bill, or continuing resolution (CR). The Senate rejected the House’s offer on a party-line vote Tuesday morning.
The leadership plan appeared to gain broad support from the conference. It drew praise from conservative leaders, and centrist members who have called for the GOP to acquiesce to Democratic demands also indicated they would vote for the bills, if reluctantly.
“There’s no harm in doing that. It keeps the pressure on, but the big picture is we have to get a clean CR,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said. “It’s not my strategy.”
The move was also an indication that Republicans are slowly moving away from their demands to dismantle President Obama’s healthcare law in the continuing resolution.
“We’ve got to mitigate the damage from ObamaCare, and we’ve got to mitigate the damage from the government shutdown,” Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) said. “Let’s move forward with opening as much of the government as we can get the Senate to agree on.”
“This goes way beyond ObamaCare,” he added. “This goes to how we operate in divided government. I think the whole ObamaCare thing is a distraction.”
The new House GOP strategy mirrors the approach that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been advocating.
“We should fund national parks and keep them open right now, today,” Cruz told reporters Tuesday. “And we saw yesterday, that can happen quickly. It doesn’t take weeks or even days, within hours, if Congress wants to, we can fund every single one of the priorities the president laid out yesterday, we can fund clean CRs if Harry Reid and the Democrats don’t object. That is what I hope we will do.”
White House press secretary Jay Carney dismissed a piecemeal approach on government funding as “not serious.”

“If we want to open the government, they should open the government,” Carney said.
The White House spokesman said Republicans were “twisting themselves into pretzels” to cater to the right wing of the party.
“They're contortionists now in all the ways they've tried to evade their essential responsibility,” Carney said.
Jeremy Herb and Justin Sink contributed.

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Let Reid and Obama veto these bills. Then they own it. 100%.
Libs =. TOTAL FAIL

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House GOP fails to pass measures to fund veterans programs, national parks and D.C. government during the federal shutdown.

House fails to pass 3 emergency funding bills amid government slimdown

Published October 01, 2013FoxNews.com








The House of Representatives tried but failed to pass three emergency funding bills Tuesday amid much political finger pointing by both parties in the wake of the potentially drawn out stalemate over the budget.




The three measures were aimed at reopening parks and monuments, continuing veterans’ benefits and allowing the municipal government of the District of Columbia to function.

But even before the House voted, the bills appeared doomed. Senate Democrats suggested GOP House members had picked high-profile parts of the government to fund as cover for their part in forcing a government slowdown, while overlooking other critical areas such as the National Institutes of Health.

“We support veterans, parks,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Tuesday afternoon. “But we can’t and we won’t be forced to choose between parks and cancer research or disease control or highway safety or the FBI.”

The White House also rejected the bills in advance.

“The president and the Senate have been clear that they won't accept this kind of game-playing, and if these bills were to come to the president's desk he would veto them," said White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage. "These piecemeal efforts are not serious and they are no way to run a government.”

Mike Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, fired back, “How does the White House justify signing the troop funding bill, but vetoing similar measures for veterans, National Parks, and District of Columbia? The President can't continue to complain about the impact of the government shutdown on veterans, visitors at National Parks, and DC while vetoing bills to help them. The White House position is unsustainably hypocritical."
The failed measures were treated by House GOP leaders as suspension bills, meaning they needed a two thirds majority to pass. The parks funding bill went down by a tally of 252 to 176, the veterans programs by 264 to 164 and the D.C. government funding by 265 to 163.
The two chambers tried in vain earlier to reach a budget resolution. Shortly after midnight, the House endorsed an approach that delays the federal health care law's individual mandate while prohibiting lawmakers, their staff and top administration officials from getting government subsidies for their health care. They formally urged the Senate to form a conference committee -- a bicameral committee where lawmakers from both chambers would meet to resolve the differences between the warring pieces of legislation.
Meeting Tuesday morning, the Senate rejected the proposal, in a party-line, 54-46 vote.
Both sides dug in, with Republicans insisting that any spending bill include provisions to chip away at ObamaCare, and Democrats refusing to allow it.
Both sides were hard at work blaming the other for the state of affairs.
"It's time for Republicans to stop obsessing over old battles. I mean, I say to my Republican friends, ObamaCare is over. It's passed, it's the law," Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said.
President Obama, speaking from the Rose Garden Tuesday afternoon, tried to put pressure on Republicans to allow a "clean" budget bill.
"Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to fund the government unless we defunded or dismantled the Affordable Care Act. They've shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans. In other words they demanded ransom just for doing their job," Obama said.
He noted the GOP did not succeed in shutting down ObamaCare, a large part of which opened officially on Tuesday.
Elsewhere in Washington, House Republicans were pressuring Democratic senators to meet them at the negotiating table to hash out a budget package.
The House appointed "conferees" overnight who would -- if the Senate agrees -- participate in a conference committee to craft a budget bill. Those GOP representatives held a press conference Tuesday to note that Democrats were nowhere to be found at that negotiating table.
"All of us here (are) sitting at a table waiting for the Senate Democrats to join us so we can begin to resolve our differences," House Republican Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said.
"The way to resolve our differences is to sit down and talk. And as you can see, there's no one here on the other side of the table," he said.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/01/waiting-game-pols-brace-for-prolonged-stalemate-amid-partial-govt-suspension/