Back-pay gets House blessing

WASHINGTON - The House, in a rare Saturday session, voted unanimously to guarantee that federal workers will receive back pay once the government shutdown ends, offering a promise of relief if not an actual rescue to more than 1 million government employees either furloughed or working without pay.

The 407-0 vote, on a measure backed by President Barack Obama, followed a morning debate in which lawmakers from both parties extolled government doctors and nurses saving lives, emergency relief workers braving disasters to rescue citizens, and NASA scientists exploring space. In 2011, many of those same lawmakers - swept to power on a Tea Party wave - pressed for legislation imposing a hard freeze on government salaries and held hearings on a federal workforce they said was overpaid and bloated.

After the vote, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, criticized Obama for what he called a failure of leadership for refusing to negotiate a way out of the impasse. But he said Republican leaders would not allow a vote to reopen the government without delivering a blow to the president’s healthcare law, with a delay in the mandate that individuals purchase health insurance and a prohibition on federal subsidies for members of Congress, White House leaders and their staffs, who must purchase policies on the law’s new insurance exchanges.

“The Republican position has been and continues to be no special treatment under the law, no special treatment under Obamacare,” Cantor said.

Frustration among Republicans is growing, however. Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Fla., who arrived in Congress on the Tea Party wave of 2010, said his party is misled if it believes that shutting down the government can disrupt or cripple the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.Because the health law is paid for by its own funding mechanisms, it is moving forward as other parts of the government have ground to a halt.

“Republicans have to realize how many significant gains we’ve made over the last three years - and we have, not only in cutting spending but really turning the tide on other things,” he said. “We can’t lose all that when there’s no connection now between the shutdown and the funding of Obamacare.”

“I think now it’s a lot about pride,” he added.

Republican Rep. Blake Farenthold of Texas, who identifies with the Tea Party, said he’d back an agreement to end the government shutdown and lift the debt ceiling if it included major revisions to U.S. tax law, significant changes to Medicare and Social Security, and other policy changes.

“The president seems unwilling to give an inch on Obamacare, so, alright, where can we find other reforms?” Farenthold said in an interview at the Capitol on Saturday just after a vote on giving furloughed workers retroactive pay. “If we can make the same or bigger difference doing something other than Obamacare, I don’t see why we wouldn’t do it.”

The Obamacare battle, he said, was for “another day.”

The House also voted, 400-1, on a resolution saying that military chaplains should be able to conduct religious services, despite the shutdown. Republicans accused the Obama administration of stifling religious freedom. Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services, said Republicans had concocted an issue that did not exist.

The lone “no” vote belonged to Rep. William Enyart, D-Ill.

The bill continues a House Republican strategy of passing a series of smaller spending measures on popular topics in an effort to pressure Democrats to reopen at least portions of the government.

So far, the bills passed include ones to finance the National Institutes of Health; to reopen national parks, monuments and museums; to pay for veterans programs; and to pay inactive National Guardsmen and reservists. In the coming days, House Republicans expect to take up at least nine other small spending bills, like financing the Head Start program for low-income children, as well as the Department of Homeland Security’s border-protection programs.

The Senate also convened Saturday and is expected to pass the back-pay measure. But the Senate is unlikely to take up any of the other House bills. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, has said he will not negotiate with Republicans or finance the government on a piecemeal basis. The Democrats want the Republicans to end the shutdown - the first in 17 years - by passing a spending bill that has no strings attached.

Ensuring that workers receive back-pay is one of the few issues on which Obama and House Republicans agree. In a statement Friday, the Office of Management and Budget said that administration “strongly supports” the Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act.

The pay for government workers - which, unlike the spending sought in other Republican measures, would be retroactive - might get consideration by the Senate, although no final decisions have been made.

At issue is a temporary measure to keep the government operating. House Republicans have linked the measure to efforts to delay or defund the president’s signature health-care legislation.Obama and Senate Democrats have refused to negotiate on the issue, demanding that the House vote on a continuing resolution without attachments.

So far, there have been few signs of possible negotiations to end the standoff, and leaders on both sides again staked out their positions Saturday during their weekly addresses.

Obama talked about the toll the shutdown was having on Americans, and he urged the House to take a vote on a “clean” spending bill. “Stop this farce,” he said. “End this shutdown now.

“The American people don’t get to demand ransom in exchange for doing their job. Neither does Congress,” Obama said. “They don’t get to hold our democracy or our economy hostage over a settled law. They don’t get to kick a child out of Head Start if I don’t agree to take her parents’ health insurance away. That’s not how our democracy is supposed to work.”

In the Republican response, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas placed the blame for the shutdown on the Democrats.

“House Republicans have repeatedly sent over legislation that would fund federal operations, but Senate Democrats have rejected each and every bill,” Cornyn said. “They’re effectively arguing that the House bills are simply illegitimate because they contain policy measures that the Democrats don’t like. But what normally happens when the two parties disagree on a policy is a negotiation.”

“It’s become disturbingly clear that the Obama-Reid shutdown is no longer about health care or spending or ideology,” he said. “It’s about politics plain and simple.”

In an interview with The Associated Press on Saturday, Obama said frustrated Americans “definitely shouldn’t give up” on the shaky roll out of the Affordable Care Act,now at the heart of the dispute with Republicans.

Obama said public interest has far exceeded the government’s expectations, causing technology glitches that thwarted millions of Americans who were trying to use government-run health-care websites.

“Folks are working around the clock and have been systematically reducing the wait times,” he said.

The federal gateway website was taken down for repairs over the weekend, again hindering people from signing up for insurance.

With no sign of a breakthrough to end the government shutdown, Obama said he would be willing to negotiate with Republicans on health care, deficit reduction and spending - but only if House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, holds votes to reopen the government and increase the nation’s borrowing limit.

Also Saturday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that the Pentagon will recall 90 percent of its furloughed civilian workers in the forthcoming days, in a move that could substantially ease the impact of the government shutdown on the federal workforce.

That means about 315,000 defense workers will go back on the job - a figure that by itself represents about 40 percent of the 800,000 federal employees on furlough.

Hagel’s decision is based on liberal interpretation of the Pay Our Military Act, a bill passed by Congress last week and signed by Obama that ensures that uniformed members of the military will not have their paychecks delayed by the shutdown. The bill includes general language exempting Defense Department civilians from furlough if they provide direct support to the military.

After consulting with Pentagon lawyers and Obama administration officials in recent days, Hagel decided that he could justify recalling most of the Pentagon’s furloughed workforce based on that provision in the law.

In a statement, Hagel said the Justice Department advised that the law would not permit a blanket recall of all civilians working for the Pentagon. But he added that attorneys for the Justice and Defense departments agreed that the law does permit the Pentagon to eliminate furloughs “for employees whose responsibilities contribute to the morale, well-being, capabilities and readiness of service members.”

In Indonesia, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Congress on Saturday to think “long and hard” about the negative message that the partial government shutdown is sending around the world, even as he disputed the perception that the deadlock in Washington is a sign of weakness.

The seemingly contradictory points underscored one problem the Obama administration faces as it tries to persuade lawmakers to end the shutdown: arguing that it hurts the national security interests of the United States and its friends while at the same time telling nervous allies that it does no such thing.

“I believe that those standing in the way [of a resolution] need to think long and hard about the message that we send to the world when we can’t get our own act together,” Kerry told reporters on the sidelines of the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum on the Indonesian resort island of Bali.

Information for this article was contributed by Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker of The New York Times; by Craig Whitlock and Jeff Simon of The Washington Post; by Robert Burns, Julie Pace and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press; and by Michael C. Bender and Derek Wallbank of Bloomberg News.