After filibuster, Senate advances spending bill

Sen. Ted Cruz leaves the Senate on Wednesday after his overnight fight against the Affordable Care Act that energized Tea Party activists but left some GOP colleagues annoyed.
Sen. Ted Cruz leaves the Senate on Wednesday after his overnight fight against the Affordable Care Act that energized Tea Party activists but left some GOP colleagues annoyed.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Senate unanimously advanced a stopgap spending measure, accelerating a showdown with House Republicans over the 2010 health-care law, with a government shutdown just six days away.

The Senate, which voted after a 21-hour speech by Texas Republican Ted Cruz protesting the law, is on track to pass a measure by the weekend to keep federal agencies open when the next fiscal year starts Tuesday, while funding the health program.

Democrats insist that they won’t accept changes to the health law as a condition for government funding, putting pressure on House Speaker John Boehner to accept the Senate bill or offer heathcare-law changes his caucus is demanding other than the defunding that is contained in the House version of the spending measure.

Republicans sought to project unity after Cruz’s speech, which emphasized an intraparty divide over the merits of trying to use the spending fight to dismantle the health-care law.

“Later this week, every Republican will unite to vote against any amendment to add funding for Obamacare,” said Senate Minority Lead-er Mitch McConnell, who had expressed concern that Cruz’s tactics could leave the House with little time to plan its next move.

Politico, a Washington newspaper for political insiders, reported Wednesday that Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas yelled at Cruz over his tactics on the continuing spending resolution during a private meeting attended by many Republican senators this week.

“It doesn’t make sense to filibuster a bill that you are actually for,” Boozman said after the article came out. He characterized the incident as a “frank discussion” within a family.

“The unwritten law is that you don’t talk about it outside of the meeting,” said Boozman, who called Cruz a friend.

The soft-spoken senator from Arkansas isn’t known for speaking out during meetings or on television.

“The loudness was not loud compared to regular standards. It was loud for me. I certainly was not yelling at anybody or anything like that,” Boozman said. “I think that it was a good discussion. Certainly from my tone you could tell I was concerned.”

His concern was over a tactic used by Cruz and some conservative groups: accusing senators of helping implement the health-care law if they didn’t back Cruz and his filibuster.

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AP

Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., leaves the Senate floor on Wednesday after a vote on a stopgap spending bill. The normally soft-spoken Boozman reportedly yelled at Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas for his budget-blocking tactics during a private meeting of GOP senators.

“I voted against [the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] numerous times, tried to defeat it,” Boozman said. “The idea that if you don’t agree that we need to go all the way to shutting down the government and then that means you’re for Obamacare, then certainly I would disagree with that.”

Arkansas’ other senator, Democrat Mark Pryor, said he didn’t listen to Cruz’s speech, saying that adding changes on the health-care law to the resolution wasn’t a good use of time in the House or Senate.

“I’d much rather the House be working on the farm bill right now. I’d rather them be working on immigration reform,” he said. “There’s so many things we need to do. We need to get back in the business of governing. These cliffs and these short-term deals are not helping anybody.”

On the discussion between Boozman and Cruz, Pryor said it is uncharacteristic of Boozman to raise his voice “other than at a Razorback football game.”

TIME SQUEEZE

The next step on the Senate’s temporary funding measure will be a vote to end debate by tonight. If the vote succeeds, the Democrats who control the chamber will move to strip language that ends funding for the health-care law from the Sept. 20 House measure. The legislative process probably will continue through the weekend.

“Every hour we delay here is an hour closer to shutting down the government,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said after Wednesday’s vote.

Once any modifications are made to the bill, Reid can set another vote to end discussion and move to consideration of the bill.

Senate rules require another day before that vote could occur, unless there’s an agreement to move it up. That means a vote to end debate should occur by Saturday and a vote to pass on Sunday at the latest. That would give the House one full workday to act before spending authority expires at midnight Monday.

The rare unanimous Senate vote Wednesday shows that lawmakers of both parties have an incentive to advance the legislation. Republicans don’t want to oppose a bill that chokes off the health-law funding, while Democrats want to move the bill forward so they they can restore the money for health care.

Cruz and Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul, another vocal critic of the health law, all voted to advance the measure.

“It’s time to vote,” Paul said. “The sooner we’re done with this, the better chance we have of not having the government shut down.”

A Democratic proposal, backed by Reid, would fund the government through Nov. 15, a month shorter than the House version, which covered spending through Dec. 15.

Democrats said the shorter stopgap period would give lawmakers time to resolve appropriations for fiscal 2014 that contain automatic reductions known as sequestration.

House Republicans are weighing their options for the spending measure when it comes back from the Senate without health-care defunding. Among them are elimination of the medical-device tax and scrapping the subsidies that members of Congress would receive to buy insurance on the insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.

“I imagine it will be repackaged with something else,” said Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C. “They’ve got a full basket of things they can put in it.”

Burr said he thought a oneyear delay in the law could pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Arizona Sen. John McCain said that if the House alters the Senate measure, he’d want tosee a vote on repealing the medical-device tax and delaying the health-care law for a year.

“All I know is how it ends,” McCain said. “You don’t defund Obamacare. I’ve seen the movie before.”

Senate Democrats rejected the Republican idea to attach repeal of the medical-device tax to a bill to keep the government open.

“That is not the strategy we’re pushing for this time,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., an advocate for repealing the tax, which affects companies such as Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc. “Right now we just want to get the government to continue operating.”

Klobuchar said advocates of a device-tax repeal are still searching for a way acceptable to both parties to offset a $30 billion revenue loss over the next decade.

THE FILIBUSTER

Cruz’s 21-hour, 19-minute speech - the fourth-longest in the Senate - compared the fight to end the health-care law with the nation’s battle for independence from Great Britain and the fight to keep the U.S. unified after the Civil War. He stopped taking at noon as the Senate began a new legislative day.

“I hope over the course of this filibuster the issues that are at the heart of this debate were put front and center in front of the American people,” Cruz said after leaving the Senate floor. “Obamacare isn’t working. When you get outside of Washington, Republicans agree on that, Democrats agree on that, independents agree on that, libertarians agree on that.”

Reid called Cruz’s move “a big waste of time.”

“It’s a shame we’re standing here having wasted perhaps two days, most of yesterday and a good part of today, when we could pass what we need to pass very quickly and send it back to the House,” Reid said after Cruz yielded the floor.

In addition to railing against the health-care law, Cruz killed time by reading from Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham and referring to the reality TV show Duck Dynasty.

When Cruz wrapped up, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the chamber’s third-ranking Democrat, chided the Texan for missing the moral of the Dr. Seuss story.

“Try something before you condemn it - you might actually like it,” Schumer said. In a reference to Sam-I-Am, the book’s main character, he added: “Maybe if he was a senator, he’d speak on the floor for 21 hours, and then when he tasted green eggs, he’d actually like them.”

McCain also voiced a rebuttal to Cruz’s filibuster, reading aloud Cruz’s comments from Tuesday comparing those who doubt the possibility of eradicating the health-care law to former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin, who had suggested Adolf Hitler and the Nazis could not be stopped in the 1940s.

“I resoundingly reject that allegation,” said McCain, whose grandfather led U.S. carrier forces in the Pacific during World War II and whose father commanded two submarines.

“It does a great disservice to those Americans who stood up and said, ‘What’s happening in Europe cannot stand.’”

Not everyone opposed Cruz’s filibuster tactic. By noon Wednesday when the Texas freshman finally sat down, Tea Party groups supporting him were in full fundraising mode.

“Please make the most generous emergency contribution you possibly can to the Tea Party Patriots right away,” the group’s mass email urged in the final minutes of Cruz’s marathon speech. “Ted Cruz is only one man, but right now he speaks for all of us.”

Cruz, 42, saw himself as using his office to turn the Senate into a platform for countering Obama’s claims about the health-care program. Cruz and other Republicans have said the legislation is causing employers to defer hiring new workers, lay off existing ones and reduce the hours of others to hold down costs as they try to ease the effect of the bill’s taxes and other requirements.

“What Ted has done is help change the debate in the country from Obama’s terms,” said former Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., one of the original patrons of the Tea Party and now president of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“It’s a painful process,” he added. “You really can’t be elegant when everyone wants to keep doing what they’re doing.” Information for this article was contributed by Kathleen Hunter, Roxana Tiron, Richard Rubin and James Rowley of Bloomberg News; by Laurie Kellman, Stephen Ohlemacher, David Bauder, David Espo, Donna Cassata, Andrew Taylor and Eric Carvin of The Associated Press; and by Sarah D. Wire of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/26/2013

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