GOP: ‘Clean’ spending bill just won’t fly

House shuns stopgap idea

House GOP leaders speak to reporters after a closed-door strategy session at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2013. From left to right are House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio. Pressure is building on Republicans over legislation to prevent a partial government shutdown, as the Democratic-led Senate is expected to strip a tea party-backed plan to defund  the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as "Obamacare," from their bill.  (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
House GOP leaders speak to reporters after a closed-door strategy session at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2013. From left to right are House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio. Pressure is building on Republicans over legislation to prevent a partial government shutdown, as the Democratic-led Senate is expected to strip a tea party-backed plan to defund the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as "Obamacare," from their bill. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

WASHINGTON - Moving closer to the brink of a government shutdown, House Republicans vowed Thursday that they won’t simply accept the stopgap legislation that is likely to remain after Senate Democrats strip away a plan to defund President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

A sense of confusion settled over the House, both over how to avoid a shutdown and how to handle legislation to increase the government’s borrowing ability to avert a default on U.S. obligations. Short of votes, House leaders shelved a vote that had been expected this weekend on the debt-limit measure and gave frustrated GOP lawmakers few clues about what they plan to do to avoid a shutdown.

The chaos sets the stage for weekend drama on Capitol Hill, with the Senate planning to send the fractious House a straightforward bill today to keep the government operating through Nov. 15 rather than partly closing down Monday at 11 p.m. CDT.

Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and several rank-and-file Republicans said the House simply won’t accept a “clean” spending measure, even though that’s been the norm in Congress on dozens of occasions since the 1995-96 government closures that bruised Republicans and strengthened the hand of Democratic President Bill Clinton.

“I don’t see that happening,” Boehner said. Still, he declared that “I have no in-terest in a government shutdown,” and he doesn’t expect one to occur Monday.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the Democratic-led chamber will not relent.

“The Senate will never pass a bill that guts the Affordable Care Act,” Reid said.

Not far from the Capitol, at a community college in Largo, Md., Obama insisted that he would not negotiate over his signature domestic achievement, either on a bill to keep the government operating or legislation to raise the nation’s borrowing authority.

“The entire world looks to us to make sure that the world economy is stable. You don’t mess with that,” Obama said of the debt ceiling/default measure. “And that’s why I will not negotiate on anything when it comes to the full faith and credit of the United States of America.

“Congress needs to put an end to governing crisis to crisis.”

Obama said Republicans are becoming increasingly “irresponsible” in their attempts to thwart the healthcare law and are trying to “blackmail” him.

Responding to Obama’s non-negotiable stand, Boehner said, “Well, I’m sorry but it just doesn’t work that way.”

A partial government shutdown would keep hundreds of thousands of federal workers off the job, close national parks and generate damaging headlines for whichever side the public holds responsible for it.

Washington faces two deadlines: the start of the new budget year and a mid-October date - now estimated for the 17th - when the government can no longer borrow money to pay its bills on time and in full.

The first deadline requires Congress to pass a spending bill to allow agencies to stay open. The midmonth deadline requires Congress to increase the government’s $16.7 trillion borrowing cap to avoid a first-ever default on its payments, which include interest obligations, Social Security benefits, payments to thousands of contractors large and small, and salaries for the military.

No Congress has tried “to threaten an economic shutdown, to suggest America not pay its bills just to try to blackmail a president into giving them some concessions on issues that have nothing to do with the budget,” Obama said.

He told his audience that a guarantee of health care is crucial to making sure middle-income Americans prosper.

“There are few things more fundamental to the economic security of the middle class - and everyone who’s trying to get into the middle class - than health care,” the president said.

The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said that because of the time it takes the Senate to approve even noncontroversial bills, if the House amends a Senate-passed spending bill and returns it to the Senate over the weekend, “That is a concession on their part that we’re going to shut down the government.”

Rep. John Fleming, R-La., said House Republicans would “continue to fight” for limits on the health-care law in the spending bill. Fleming said leaders also discussed contingency plans for a shutdown.

“There is always a possibility, [but] that is not the goal at all, we don’t want to shut down government but we can’t control what the Senate does,” Fleming said.

In the Senate, Reid sought to schedule a series of votes Thursday night to speed the short-term spending bill to the House. Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, blocked the effort, however, saying they wanted the vote today.

Cruz gave a 21-hour-plus speech earlier this week opposing the measure if it is changed to remove the antihealth-care provisions. Reid’s request sparked an exchange between Cruz and Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who accused theTea Party duo of being publicity hounds who want a vote today because that’s what they’ve told outside activists to expect.

“My two colleagues, who I respect, have sent out emails around the world and turned this into a show,” Corker said. “And that is taking priority over getting legislation back to the House so they can take action before the country’s government shuts down.”

DEBT-CEILING DISPUTE

Meeting in private, House Republican leaders encountered resistance from their rank and file over the debt-limit measure even though they were attaching a list of other Republican favorites such as green-lighting the Keystone XL oil pipeline, blocking federal regulation of greenhouse gases and boosting offshore oil exploration.

Republicans’ last-ditch effort on the health-care law comes just days before coast-to-coast enrollment in healthcare exchanges begins Tuesday. The enrollment period lasts through March, with insurance coverage beginning in January.

Despite some popular health-care-act provisions,the leadership has struggled to win over recalcitrant GOP members, especially Tea Party-backed lawmakers pressing for deeper, deficit-cutting spending measures.

The spending cuts the Republicans would attach to the debt-limit legislation would be likely to represent a small fraction of the almost $1 trillion in new borrowing authority the bill would permit.

“Among conservatives, there’s a lot of angst about that,” said Fleming.

Republican Reps. Paul Broun of Georgia, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Tim Huelskamp of Kansas and Mo Brooks of Alabama said they would oppose the leadership’s debt-limit measure.Others, including Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Tom Price of Georgia, said they support it. Republicans have a 232-200 majority in the House and can lose only 15 members on a party-line vote.

Huelskamp, who opposed Boehner as House speaker, said “at least 18” members would oppose the measure.

“It looks like a $1 trillion increase, and it doesn’t meet the Boehner one-for-one rule,” he said in an interview. He said the bill also doesn’t balance the U.S. budget in 10 years.

“This debt-ceiling package does not fix the underlying cause of the problem, which are the deficits,” Brooks told reporters Thursday at the Capitol. “We need to significantly cut government spending.”

Proposed changes include requiring federal workers to contribute more to their pensions, along with other items from a failed 2011 deficit-cutting effort. The Republican bill also will seek to increase means-testing for Medicare, reduce the Medicaid provider tax, revise medical malpractice law and eliminate a public-health fund as part of the 2010 law. Republicans also want to eliminate a tax on medical devices and require a Social Security number to receive a child tax credit, according to the proposal.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority whip, said all of those measures have passed in the House since Republicans took over in 2011, but they have gone nowhere in the Democratic Senate.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, insisted that the House accept the Senate bill.

“Republicans have got to put an end to the Tea Party temper tantrums and pass our bill without any gimmicks and without any games,” she said.

She called the House debt ceiling “Christmas list” disingenuous.

“This is not the time to throw in your 50 favorite flavors,” she said. “You can’t just throw everything against the wall and see what happens.” OF NO EFFECT

A partial government shutdown next week would leave the major parts of the health-care law in place and rolling along, according to former Democratic and Republican budget officials, as well as the Obama administration.

Part of the reason for that is that government doesn’t grind to a halt. National defense, law enforcement, air traffic control and other activities involving the safety of human life and the protection of property continue.

Ditto for big entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, whose “mandatory” funding does not have to be renewed annually by Congress. The Affordable Care Act is the newest addition to that club of budget heavyweights.

The employees who administer such programs also may be considered essential staffing. During the Clinton-era shutdowns, Social Security returned nearly 50,000 furloughed employees to their jobs to handle claims.

“Many of the core parts of the health-care law are funded through mandatory appropriations and wouldn’t be affected,” Gary Cohen, the Health and Human Services Department official overseeing the health-care rollout, told reporters this week.

That’s pretty much how a former top GOP congressional budget expert sees it too. “A government shutdown, absent any legislation, does not fundamentally alter the Affordable Care Act,” said Bill Hoagland, now a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, an advocacy group that’s trying to bridge the political divide in Washington.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chief economic adviser to 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, concurs. “As a policy matter, it won’t succeed in stopping Obamacare,” he said of a government shutdown. “We have put much of the government on cruise control.”

The main benefits of the health-care law - tax credits and expanded Medicaid - are mandatory spending and cannot be unwound through an annual funding bill for government operations. As for implementation money, much of it was provided under the law itself. Core functions such as operating call centers and building online systems are being handled by private contractors, not government employees. When money has run short, the administration has been able to divert unspent funds in other accounts.

Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Taylor, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Donna Cassata, Alan Fram, Stephen Ohlemacher and Erica Werner of The Associated Press; by Roger Runningen, Richard Rubin, Roxana Tiron and Kathleen Hunter of Bloomberg News; by Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/27/2013

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