Shutdown imminent: House officials say no more funding votes tonight


View Photo Gallery — Teetering on the brink of a government shutdown: The Senate rejected House amendments to a short-term spending bill Monday, moving the U.S. government closer to its first shutdown in nearly two decades.


By Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane, Updated: Monday, September 30, 8:04 PM E-mail the writers

The U.S. government was poised to shut down for the first time in 17 years early Tuesday, after a Congress bitterly divided over President Obama’s signature health-care initiative failed to reach agreement to fund federal agencies into the new fiscal year.
Hours before a midnight deadline, the Republican House voted 228 to 201 to pass its third proposal in two weeks to fund the government. Like the previous plans, it sought to undermine the Affordable Care Act, this time by delaying enforcement of the “individual mandate,” a cornerstone of the law that requires all Americans to obtain health insurance.

The new measure also sought to strip lawmakers and their aides of long-standing government health benefits.
The Democratic Senate quickly rejected that plan on a party-line vote of 54 to 46. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) urged House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to abandon the assault on the health care law and pass a simple bill to keep the government open. Otherwise, Reid warned, “the responsibility for this Republican government shutdown will rest squarely on his shoulders.”
Boehner refused to yield. He called instead for a special committee to meet in the coming days to resolve differences between the two parties, leaving the fate of millions of federal workers and the services they provide in limbo.
But Reid rejected the House’s plan to appoint conferees for House-Senate negotiations on a new short-term spending plan.
“We’re not going to go to conference with a gun to a head,” Reid said. “Republicans are still playing games.”
He added that Republicans are forcing a government shutdown, “because they don’t believe in government, and tomorrow will be a bad day for government and a day of celebration over in the House.”
He insisted that the House must first pass a “clean” six-week continuing resolution without any language to curtail or defund the new health-care law.
The impasse means 800,000 federal workers will be furloughed Tuesday. National parks, monuments and museums, as well as most federal offices, will close. Tens of thousands of air-traffic controllers, prison guards and border-patrol agents will be required to serve without pay. And many congressional hearings — including one scheduled Tuesday into last month’s Navy Yard shootings — will be postponed.
In a last-minute ray of hope for active-duty troops, President Obama has signed a bill that ensures that certain members of the U.S. military and U.S. Coast Guard will be paid during a government shutdown.
The White House said Obama signed the “Pay Our Military Act” late Monday. The bill, approved unanimously in the last day by the House and Senate, ensures that active-duty military service members, plus civilians and contractors with the departments of Defense and Homeland Security who support active-duty troops and guardsmen, will still be paid during the temporary cessation of most government activities.
But Obama warned that the broader economy, which is finally starting to recover from the shocks of the last six years, would take a substantial hit if congressional gridlock shutters “America’s largest employer.”
“Keeping the people’s government open is not a concession to me. Keeping vital services running and hundreds of thousands of Americans on the job is not something you ‘give’ to the other side. It’s our basic responsibility,” Obama said in a statement early Monday evening at the White House.
“Time is running out. My hope and expectation is that in the eleventh hour, once again, that Congress will choose to do the right thing and that the House of Representatives, in particular, will choose the right thing.”

Afterward, Obama called Boehner to talk about the situation. The discussion lasted nearly 10 minutes, according to Boehner’s office, and later, during a floor speech, the speaker mocked the president: “I’m not going to negotiate,” the speaker said, quoting the president’s defiant stance that he would not engage in horse trading on the funding bill or the federal debt-ceiling measure later this month.
“I would say to the president: This is not about me. It’s not about Republicans here in Congress. It’s about fairness,” Boehner said in a speech that drew applause for the embattled speaker from Republicans.
On both sides of the Capitol, Republicans were deeply divided about the course Boehner and his leadership team chose. In the House, a group of more moderate Republicans was seething about the decision to bow to the forces — led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and his allies — who oppose the Affordable Care Act.
Some publicly urged Boehner to abandon the assault on the health-care law and seek House Democrats’s help to pass the simple six-week government-funding bill that the Senate approved last week.
“I don’t want to shut down the government,” said Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), who is trying to become her state’s first GOP senator since the 1950s.
Frustrations also were simmering among Senate Republicans, who complained that House leaders were pressing the attack in direct opposition to public opinion. Polls show that voters overwhelmingly disapprove of using the threat of a shutdown to defund the health-care law and that blame for a shutdown would fall squarely on Republicans’ shoulders.
“By wanting to repeal Obamacare using this method, it defies what the popular will is,” said Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, who campaigned last year on behalf of his party’s national ticket. “I campaigned in 2012 all over this country for months: ‘Repeal and replace Obamacare.’ That was not the mandate of the voters. . . . If they wanted to repeal Obamacare, the 2012 election would have been probably significantly different.”
McCain said he wanted the House to send a clean continuing resolution back to the Senate to fund the government. “That will happen sooner or later,” he said, and added that Republicans “can’t win” if they continue down the current path.
Adding to the tension Monday was Boehner’s decision add another provision to the mix. In addition to delaying the individual mandate, his latest plan calls for stripping lawmakers and congressional staff members of the employer subsidies for health insurance they have received for many years.
Now that lawmakers and their aides must join the new health-insurance exchanges, some conservative groups have attacked the subsidies, worth about $5,000 a year for individual coverage and $10,000 for families, as a “special exemption” from the new law. By including the provision, House leaders hoped to attract conservative support while putting pressure on Senate Democrats, who would face the choice of shutting down the government to protect their own perks.
“On what flooding peninsula can you stand when it’s a question of delaying the individual mandate, ending member subsidies and funding the government?” said Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.). If Reid kills it, “the senators he’s going to protect become the subject of incredible scrutiny.”

Even some Republicans were uneasy about the prospect of dealing their aides — and some of their colleagues — the equivalent of a big pay cut. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) called it an “outrage,” adding that Boehner had worked with Reid and the Obama administration to make sure the subsidies would stay in place when congressional employees join the exchanges next year.
Boehner and his team presented the proposal to the GOP rank and file in a closed-door meeting Monday. For more than an hour and a half, lawmakers argued about the plan.
When they emerged, there was an unusual number of public dissenters. Rep. Peter T. King (N.Y.), one of the most moderate members of the House GOP conference, said he and as many as 20 others would vote no.
“I don’t want to be the facilitator of a disastrous process and plan,” King told reporters.
But most Republicans endorsed the deal, even if some seemed somewhat reluctant. And the plan easily cleared an initial procedural hurdle late Monday, when the House voted 225 to 204 to allow debate to proceed.
“I think this is a principled call by leadership and it has the support of the conference,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), one of Boehner’s closest friends.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said the option of passing a clean government-funding bill was not discussed in the meeting. He added that it would be up to the Senate to keep the government open once the House voted late Monday.
“The Senate can move very quickly if they’re inclined to do so, so we will get this passed in time for midnight,” Ryan said. “If the Senate chooses not to get this done before midnight, that will be their choice.”
The flurry of last-minute activity marked the latest chapter in a drama that began when lawmakers returned to Washington just three weeks ago from their summer break. After originally counseling his troops to pass a clean funding bill and save the fight over the health-care law for the coming debate over the federal debt limit, Boehner relented, and the House passed a measure that sought to fully defund the measure.
Despite a 21-hour talkathon by Cruz and his allies on the House floor, the Senate dispatched with that proposal, sending back a simple bill to keep the government open through Nov. 15.
Over the weekend, the House struck back, endorsing a new plan it deemed a compromise. It would not defund the health-care law, but merely delay its taxes, mandates and benefits for one year.
On Monday, the Senate quickly rejected that idea, tabling the House amendments on a party-line vote of 54 to 46.
Republicans responded by suggesting a deal that would keep the government open for one more week while the fight over the Affordable Care Act continued.
But Reid and other Senate Democrats warned Boehner that they would reject that, too.
“This is a six-week funding bill. That’s all it is, six weeks. If we can’t pass this, we’re truly entering a banana-Republican mind-set,” Reid said.
“The bottom line is very simple,” added Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). “You negotiate on this, they will up the ante for the debt limit.”


Ed O’Keefe, Rosalind S. Helderman, Jackie Kucinich and Jeff Simon contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/washington-braces-for-the-first-shutdown-of-the-national-government-in-17-years/2013/09/30/977ebca2-29bd-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html