WASHINGTON - Republican leaders will include in a stopgap-spending measure a provision that would defund President Barack Obama’s health-care law.
The stopgap-spending measure would expire Dec.15, while discretionary and mandatory spending on the health law would end permanently, Republican Reps. John Fleming of Louisiana and Tom Cole of Oklahoma said Wednesday after a party meeting at the Capitol.
With the deadline for reaching a budget deal 13 days away and the government closing in on its debt ceiling, officials said the House could vote on the spending measure as soon as tonight. A second measure, to be brought to the floor as early as next week, would allow the Treasury Department to borrow freely for one year.
The House will take up a spending plan that could pass with 218 Republican votes, setting up a clash with the Democratic-led Senate and the White House that puts the federal government at risk of a shutdown. In anticipation, the Obama administration is urging agencies to prepare, and the president on Wednesday told business executives that Republicans are holding the budget hostage as part of an “ideological fight.”
Congress hasn’t passed a budget for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. If the White House and lawmakers can’t agree on stopgap funding, most, though not all, operations would come to a halt.
“There should be no conversation about shutting the government down,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters in Washington on Wednesday. Republicans have “no interest” in doing so, he said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the chamber would wait until the House passes a measure before taking action. Democrats have said they won’t defund the health-care law. Negotiations between the Senate and House could risk a shutdown because the Senate almost certainly will alter the House measure.
“They’re still struggling to find out which absurd idea will prevail,” Reid said of the House Republicans.
Legislation to increase the government’s borrowing authority will include a one year delay of the health law, a “path forward” on revamping the U.S. tax code and the approval of TransCanada Corp.’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline, said Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.
The bill also would include possible cuts to entitlement programs and a provision that requires the U.S. Treasury to prioritize its debt payments in the event borrowing reaches the authorized ceiling, Cole said.
Obama appealed to members of the Business Roundtable to use their influence on lawmakers to break the stalemate.
“You have never seen, in the history of the United States, the debt ceiling, or the threat of not raising the debt, being used to extort a president or a governing party and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and have nothing to do with the debt,” Obama said in Washington.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged House members in a letter Wednesday not to risk a government shutdown and to raise the debt limit in a “timely manner.”
“It is not in the best interest of the U.S. business community or the American people to risk even a brief government shutdown that might trigger disruptive consequences or raise new policy uncertainties washing over the U.S. economy,” Bruce Josten, the chamber’s executive vice president for government affairs, wrote in the letter.
Separately, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said it was time to settle the fight over raising the ceiling on government borrowing.
“This is one of the risks we are looking at,” Bernanke said at a news conference, expressing concern that a lingering battle between Congress and the White House over the debt limit - and default - could slow the national economy.
Sylvia Burwell, director of the Office of Management and Budget, issued a 16-page memo Tuesday directing agency executives to begin preparing for a “lapse in appropriations” for the new fiscal year.
“The administration does not want a lapse in appropriations to occur,” she said. “However, prudent management requires that agencies be prepared for the possibility of a lapse.”
Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., said the GOP is trying to maximize its leverage for the debt-ceiling fight.
“You go into that discussion and try to get as much as we can, with divided government,” he said.
Several Republicans, who last week opposed the leaders’ plan to force the Senate to vote on a resolution that would end funding for the health law, now back the latest plan.
“This would be the first time in two years and nine months I actually get to vote for defunding on a must-pass legislation,” Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., said Wednesday.
He said “almost all Republicans” would vote for the plan. Those who don’t “would be those who want a primary opponent in the next election. I don’t think anybody wants to do that too badly.”
Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based research institution led by former Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, on Wednesday endorsed the House’s plan to fund the government and defund the health law.
A lapse in funding authority could close national parks, monuments and museums, shut government offices and place on furlough hundreds of thousands of federal workers, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.
An agency-by-agency forecast for a shutdown is difficult to predict, the service said, because administrators and lawyers have leeway in deciding “what agency activities are excepted or otherwise legally authorized to continue during an appropriations hiatus.”
The longest government shutdown lasted 21 days, from Dec. 16, 1995, to Jan. 6, 1996, and cost the government $1.4 billion, according to the report. That cost also included a brief closing in November 1995.
MILITARY BRASS QUIZZED
Amid the greater budget battle, the head of the House Armed Services Committee told the nation’s top military brass Wednesday that their credibility “is on the line” if they don’t give greater details about how budget cuts will affect national security.
“Gentlemen, for two years you or your predecessors have come to this committee describing the consequences of sequestration in generalities and percentages,” California Republican Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon told the military service chiefs in opening a hearing on Capitol Hill.
“Today I expect to hear - in very clear terms - what elements of that security you will no longer be in a position to provide” should the cuts continue, McKeon told the chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. He was referring to the automatic spending cuts that kicked in March 1; they are projected to slash $52 billion from the defense budget for fiscal 2014, resulting from Congress’ failure to trim the federal deficit.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno testified the Army would have to shrink its active-duty force by 26 percent, to 420,000 people. Odierno also said readiness would be degraded to the point where 85 percent of the force by the end of the next budget year would not be prepared to deploy if a conflict popped up somewhere in the world.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh III said his service in the next budget year would have to cut flying hours by 15 percent; personnel by 25,000, or 4 percent; and aircraft by 550, or 9 percent.
FOOD STAMPS DEBATED
Also Wednesday, Republican House leaders were working to line up votes for nearly $4 billion in annual food stamp cuts, but some GOP moderates were questioning if that is too much.
The savings would be achieved by allowing states to put broad new work requirements in place for many food-stamp recipients and to test applicants for drugs. The House is scheduled to vote on the bill Thursday.
The bill also would end government waivers that have allowed able-bodied adults who don’t have dependents to receive food stamps indefinitely.
Conservatives have said the almost $80 billion-a-year program has become bloated. More than 47 million Americans, or 1 in 7, are now on food stamps, and the program’s cost has more than doubled in the past five years as the economy has struggled.
But finding a compromise - and the votes - to scale back the food program has been difficult. Conservatives have insisted on larger cuts, while Democrats have been united in opposition and moderate Republicans from areas with high food-stamp usage have been wary of efforts to slim the program.
“I think the cuts are too drastic and too draconian,” says Republican Rep. Michael Grimm of New York, who represents Staten Island, which was hard hit by Hurricane Sandy last year. “Those that really need the program will suffer.”
Grimm said he plans to vote against the bill. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, also plans a “no” vote, according to his spokesman, Michael Anderson. He said Young is concerned about the impact the cuts could have on people in his state’s poorest, most rural areas.
Even if the bill does pass, it is not expected to become law. The Democratic Senate has opposed any major cuts, and that chamber passed a farm bill in June that had around a tenth of the cuts in the House bill, or around $400 million a year. Obama has also opposed cuts that go beyond the Senate bill and issued a veto threat in a statement Wednesday.
Information for this article was contributed by Roxana Tiron, Roger Runningen, Kathleen Hunter and Richard Rubin of Bloomberg News and by Mary Clare Jalonick, Pauline Jelinek, Donna Cassata, Andrew Taylor and Jim Kuhnhenn of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/19/2013