Finger-pointing gets into high gear in D.C.

Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ar., right, joins other Republican House Members as they call on Senate Democrats to "come back to work" on the Senate Steps of the U.S. Capitol Sunday, Sept. 29, 2013 as the United States braces for a partial government shutdown Tuesday after the White House and congressional Democrats declared they would reject a bill approved by the Republican-led House to delay implementing President Barack Obama's health care reform. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ar., right, joins other Republican House Members as they call on Senate Democrats to "come back to work" on the Senate Steps of the U.S. Capitol Sunday, Sept. 29, 2013 as the United States braces for a partial government shutdown Tuesday after the White House and congressional Democrats declared they would reject a bill approved by the Republican-led House to delay implementing President Barack Obama's health care reform. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

WASHINGTON - With the government teetering on the brink of partial shutdown, congressional Republicans vowed Sunday to keep using a federal funding bill to try to attack the president’s healthcare law.

Congress was closed Sunday after the GOP-run House voted after midnight EDT Saturday to delay by a year key parts of the new healthcare law and repeal a tax on makers of medical devices, in exchange for avoiding a shutdown. The Senate was to convene this afternoon, just hours before the shutdown deadline, and Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had already promised that majority Democrats would kill the House’s latest bill, which President Barack Obama has also said he would veto.

Since the last government shutdown 17 years ago, temporary funding bills known as continuing resolutions have been routinely passed, with neither party willing to chance a shutdown to achieve legislative goals. But with health-insurance exchanges set to open Tuesday, Tea Party Republicans appear willing to take the risk in their drive to kill the health-care law.

Action in Washington was limited mainly to the Sunday talk shows and a barrage of news releases as Democrats and Republicans rehearsed arguments for blaming each other if the government in fact closes its doors at 12:01 a.m. EDT Tuesday.

“You’re going to shut down the government if you can’t prevent millions of Americans from getting affordable care,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.

“The House has twice now voted to keep the government open. And if we have a shutdown, it will only be because when the Senate comes back, Harry Reid says, ‘I refuse even to talk,’” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who led a 21-hour speech against allowing the temporary funding bill to advance if the Senate stripped it clean of a Tea Party-backed provision to derail the health law, commonly referred to as Obamacare. The effort ultimately failed.

Reid, in effect, told the American people to “go jump in a lake” and is forcing the government into a shutdown, said Cruz. “I hope he backs away from that ledge.”

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., said on CNN’s State of the Union that Democrats in the Senate, not House Republicans, were pushing the country to the brink.

“They’re the ones truly threatening a government shutdown,” she said. Rodgers said a delay in the health-care law was necessary because “the wheels are falling off” the program.

On the same show, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a Democrat, said Rodgers’ statements showed that Republicans are afraid that the healthcare law will be a success.

“They realize that once this goes into effect, people are going to like it,” Dean said.

The battle started with a House vote to pass the short term funding bill with a provision that would have eliminated the federal dollars needed to put Obama’s health-care overhaul into place. The Senate voted along party lines to strip that out and lobbed the measure back to the House.

The latest House measure, passed after midnight EDT Saturday by a near party-line vote of 231-192, sent back to the Senate two key changes: a one year delay of key provisions of the health-insurance law and repeal of a new tax on makers of medical devices that partially funds it.

All four of Arkansas’ representatives in the U.S. House voted to pass the measure.

Senate rules often make it difficult to act quickly, but the chamber can act on the House’s latest proposals by simply calling them up and killing them.

All Reid needs are 51 Democrats to vote with him - not the usual 60-vote threshold required for most Senate business - and the spending bill will go back to the House in a matter of minutes.

However, one of the House’s top leaders vowed its members would not simply give in to Democrats’ demands to pass the Senate’s “clean” funding bill.

“The House will get back together in enough time, send another provision not to shut the government down, but to fund it, and it will have a few other options in there for the Senate to look at again,” said the No. 3 House Republican, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. “We are not shutting the government down.”

But Democrats said the GOP’s bravado may fade as the deadline to avert a shutdown nears.

Asked whether he could vote for a “clean” temporary funding bill, Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, said he couldn’t. But Labrador added, “I think there’s enough people in the Republican Party who are willing to do that. And I think that’s what you’re going to see.”

McCarthy wouldn’t say what changes Republicans might make. He appeared to suggest that a very short-term measure might pass at the last minute, but GOP aides said that was unlikely.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he thinks there will be a government shutdown.

“I predict the Senate is going to reject this House overture that was sent to us last night,” Durbin said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation.

Republicans argued that Reid should have convened the Senate on Sunday to act on the measure.

“If the Senate stalls until Monday afternoon instead of working today, it would be an act of breathtaking arrogance by the Senate Democratic leadership,” said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on Sunday. “They will be deliberately bringing the nation to the brink of a government shutdown.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, also urged Reid to call the Senate back into session Sunday.

“In less than 48 hours, our government will shut down,” Cornyn said in an emailed statement. “Instead of taking a day off, Majority Leader Reid should call Senators back to Washington and pass the common sense legislation to delay Obamacare.”

In the event lawmakers miss today’s deadline, about 800,000 workers will be forced off the job without pay. Some critical services such as patrolling the borders, inspecting meat and controlling air traffic would continue. Social Security benefits would be sent, and the Medicare and Medicaid healthcare programs for the elderly and poor would continue to pay doctors and hospitals.

The Senate was not scheduled to meet until midafternoon today, 10 hours before a shutdown would begin, and even some Republicans said privately they feared that Reid held the advantage in the fast-approaching end game.

Republicans argued that they had already made compromises; for instance, their latest measure would leave intact most parts of the healthcare law that have taken effect, including requiring insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions and to let families’ plans cover children up to age 26. They also would allow insurers to deny contraception coverage based on religious or moral objections.

Tea Party lawmakers in the House forced GOP leaders to abandon an earlier plan to deliver a “clean” stopgap spending bill to the Senate and move the fight to another measure looming in mid-October: a bill to increase the government’s borrowing cap to avert a first-ever default on U.S. obligations.

Former President Bill Clinton, whose Democratic administration was the last to experience a partial government shutdown in 1996, said he wouldn’t negotiate with Republicans on the eve of another shutdown.

“I think there are times when you have to call people’s bluff,” Clinton said in an interview with ABC’s This Week. Republican tactics to undermine the 2010 health-care law seem “almost spiteful,” he said.

Clinton recalled some “extremely minor” negotiations during his administration’s partial closures and said that, in this case, there isn’t an opportunity for real talks.

McCarthy appeared on Fox News Sunday, while Cruz and Labrador were on NBC’s Meet the Press. Van Hollen appeared on Face the Nation.

Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Taylor of The Associated Press; by Danielle Ivory, Jesse Hamilton, Roxana Tiron, Richard Rubin and Kathleen Hunter of Bloomberg News; and by Jeremy W. Peters, Jonathan Weisman and Brian Knowlton of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/30/2013

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