WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday passed legislation to keep the government financed through September, raising pressure on the Senate to quickly follow suit before the current financing runs out March 27.
President Barack Obama, meanwhile, hosted a dinner with a dozen Republican senators at a hotel near the White House in search of bipartisan support for a deficit-cutting approach that includes the higher taxes he seeks, as well as savings from Medicare and other benefit programs that the senators stress. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate did not participate.
Wednesday’s House vote, 267-151, included 53 Democrats and indicated that the Senate will have little political latitude to take the financing bill in a drastically different direction. The House bill gives military and veterans programs some breathing room under the automatic spending cuts that took effect Friday by increasing financing for Pentagon priorities.
But domestic programs are left largely unprotected from cuts of up to 11 percent under the so-called sequestration.
Arkansas’ full House delegation - four Republicans - voted for the legislation.
“Today the House has taken the first step towards assuring the American people that the federal government will stay open, which President Obama agrees should be our shared goal,” said SpeakerJohn Boehner, R-Ohio. “The Senate should pass the House measure without delay so we can continue focusing on helping Americans get back to work and putting the country on a path to a balanced budget.”
Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she would demand the kind of changes the House afforded military programs for at least some of the domestic side of the spending bill. That way Congress can prioritize programs that lift economic growth now, like transportation and infrastructure, and strengthen future economic growth through science and technology, even within the strictures of across-the-board cuts.
She praised the House for moving quickly on its bill rather than flirting with a government shutdown March 27. But, she said, the bill “is too spartan for us because it does not contain domestic priorities.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said Republican leaders in the House and Senate accepted that Senate Democrats would want to put their mark on the spending plan. He was still sanguine that a final measure would reach Obama in time for Congress’ two-week spring recess, set to begin March 23.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Senate majority leader, cautiously praised the House’s nonconfrontational approach to the spending plan.
“What remains to be seen is whether this move, apparently away from a crisis, is truly a shift in strategy for Republicans or just a short break from the extremism that they’ve had over the last few years,” he said.
The House’s spending measure requires that the Postal Service maintain a sixday mail delivery schedule, a potential setback for the aims of the agency, which announced last month that it planned go to five-day deliveries to cut costs.
While the short-term financing measure advanced, the Republican leaders of the House Budget Committee will begin laying out the challenges they face in drafting a blueprint on taxes and spending designed to bring the government’s budget into balance in 10 years, a goal they have set for themselves.
Next week, Obama is scheduled to make a rare visit to Capitol Hill to meet separately with Democrats and Republicans.
McConnell said Wednesday that he appreciated the effort.
“We have numerous challenges facing the country, and Republicans have offered the president serious solutions to shrink Washington spending and grow the economy,” McConnell said. “And we will have an opportunity to discuss them with the president at the lunch.”
Republican aides said that Denis McDonough, the president’s new chief of staff, requested the luncheon meetings on Obama’s behalf.
An expected winter storm presented one obstacle. The difference between the parties - with Democrats insisting that any further deficit reduction include both spending cuts and tax increases and Republicans insisting on only spending cuts - will present a bigger one over the long term.
“As we have seen over the last number of years, the differences between the two sides are going to be stark,” said Sen. Patty Murray, DWash., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
The House’s budget blueprint - the third under the House Budget Committee chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan, RWis. - will not be formally released until next week.
To win the acquiescence of the House’s most ardent conservatives on recent legislation that suspended the government’s debt ceiling until May, Ryan promised that his plan would bring the budget into balance in a decade, something his last budget projected would take nearly 30 years.
For the past two years, Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2012, has proposed converting Medicare into a system that gives senior citizens afixed subsidy that would be used to buy insurance on the private market. But he also promised that the overhaul would not affect anyone now older than 55.
That age limit will almost certainly have to rise for Medicare savings to show within the 10-year budget-balancing window, House conservatives say. That has led to misgivings among more moderate Republicans, who fear leaving themselves vulnerable to Democratic criticism of undercutting popular retirement programs.
“We’ll let them work it out and see what outcome they get,” Boehner said when asked about an earlier date for the onset of Medicare changes.
Ryan, who also has spoken with Obama in recent days, also is likely to propose cuts to many programs unaffected by the automatic reductions, such as food stamps, Medicaid, social-service block grants and farm subsidies. He would use those savings to reduce some of the automatic cuts, including in the military.
Ryan’s work was made somewhat easier by the $620 billion in higher tax revenue secured by Obama during the showdown in December over the pending expiration of all the Bush-era tax cuts.
That higher overall tax revenue is expected to show up in Ryan’s budget plan although he would then reshape the tax code with a broad overhaul.
Murray’s budget, also likely to be unveiled next week, will use a mix of new tax revenue and shifted spending cuts to undo automatic spending cuts in 2014 and beyond.
Obama’s dinner with Senate Republicans stemmed from a suggestion he made during a conversation recently with GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, according to a presidential aide.
Joining Graham at Wednesday’s dinner were Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, John McCain of Arizona, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Bob Corker of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, John Hoeven of North Dakota, Dan Coats of Indiana, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Mike Johanns of Nebraska. The two-hour dinner took placeon neutral territory - the Jefferson Hotel, a few blocks from the White House.
A White House official said Obama had a good exchange of ideas with the lawmakers, but offered no specifics on what was discussed. The president picked up the tab for dinner, the White House said.
McCain, responding to a reporter’s question about how the dinner went, jokingly said “terrible,” then added that the meal went “just fine.”
As the sequestration has started taking effect, Obama has begun quietly calling congressional Republicans to discuss the prospects for an elusive longer-term deficit reduction deal as well as his other second-term priorities.
Aides say Obama is concentrating his outreach on lawmakers with a history of bipartisan deal-making and those who have indicated some willingness to support increased tax revenue as part of a big deficit-cutting package.
Graham, a frequent critic of the White House on national-security issues, said he was encouraged by Obama’s efforts.
“This is how you solve hard problems,” he said.
In other developments, Boehner says public tours of the Capitol will continue, despite mandatory spending cuts that led the Secret Service and the National Park Service to announce Tuesday that public tours of the White House will end, starting Saturday, until further notice.
Information for this article was contributed by Jonathan Weisman and Ron Nixon of The New York Times; and by David Espo, Andrew Taylor, Julie Pace, Donna Cassata, Jim Kuhnhenn, Josh Lederman, Erica Werner and Darlene Superville of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/07/2013