Vote to spend: House throws down gauntlet

WASHINGTON - With its vote to finance the federal government through Dec. 15 and choke off funding for President Barack Obama’s health-care law, the House on Friday set up a showdown with the Senate and White House.

House Republicans said they wouldn’t accept Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plan to remove the healthcare language from the bill next week and warned of a temporary government shutdown after the fiscal year ends Sept. 30.

“We’ll add some other things that they hate and make them eat that, and we’ll play this game up until either Sept. 30, Oct. 3, somewhere in between,” said Rep. Richard Hudson, a first-term Republican from North Carolina. “Harry Reid’s going to realize we’re serious, and hopefully at that point, he’ll begin to negotiate with us.”

In Friday’s 230-189 vote, the House backed a stopgap measure to fund government operations after current authority expires. The legislation preserves across-the-board spending cuts at an annual rate of $986.3 billion and permanently defunds the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The four U.S. representatives from Arkansas, all Republicans, voted in favor of the bill.

“We had a victory today for the American people, and frankly, we also had a victory for common sense,” House Speaker John Boehner said after the vote. He added: “Our message to the United States Senate is real simple: The American people don’t want the government shut down and they don’t want Obamacare.”

The dispute over the spending bill is colliding with the debate on fiscal policy that will play out in the next month. Congress must act by mid-October to raise the $16.7trillion debt ceiling, or the nation is at risk of not having enough money to pay its bills.

“The fight to delay Obamacare doesn’t end next week. It keeps going on until we get it,” Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican and his party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, told reporters Friday in Washington.

Democratic Reps. Jim Matheson of Utah and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina voted with the Republicans. Rep. Scott Rigell, R-Va., opposed the measure, saying it wouldn’t replace automatic spending cuts or address reliance on short-term funding measures.

The spending measure now will be sent to the Senate.

The Senate won’t pass a bill that takes money away from the 2010 health-care law, Reid said. Some Senate Republicans, including John McCain of Arizona, have said the chamber won’t pass changes to the health law.

McCain, in an interview this week, called efforts to defund the law a political “suicide note.”

Reid said in a statement: “Republicans are simply postponing for a few days the inevitable choice they must face: pass a clean bill to fund the government, or force a shutdown. Republicans here in Washington are using these stunts to raise money and grab headlines.”

Obama administration officials repeatedly have said that the president will veto the House bill if Congress sends it to him.

“Congress is not meeting the test of helping middle-class families,” Obama said at a Ford Motor Co. plant in a suburb of Kansas City, Mo. “They’re focused on trying to mess with me.”

Rep. Kerry Bentivolio, R-Mich., said Obama would eventually fold and accept the Republican position.

“We’re going to defund Obamacare,” he said. “We’re going to win this. We are going to win this. We are going to win this. The American people are going to speak up, and he’s going to listen. He has to listen.”

If the Obama administration and lawmakers can’t agree on the stopgap funding, most, though not all, operations would come to a halt in less than two weeks.

“Our brave men and women of our military don’t get paid; our recovering economy will take a huge hit, and our most vulnerable citizens - including the elderly and veterans who rely on critical government programs and services - could be left high and dry,” said Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky.

Republicans are using the stopgap spending bill as a vehicle to try to block funds for the health program the party has opposed since 2009.

DEBT BILL TAKES LOAD

The House is assembling a bill to suspend the debt limit until Dec. 31, 2014, according to a proposal distributed by party leaders to Republican members and obtained by Bloomberg News.

The measure will look “at debt over the long term, and that is what matters the most,” Ryan told reporters in Washington on Friday.

The bill, projected to save at least $256 billion, also would include other party priorities, such as a one-year delay of Obama’s health-care plan, approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, revamping the U.S. tax code and cutting government regulations. The debt-limit bill also would encourage offshore energy production, energy production on federal lands and block Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse-gas and coal-ash regulations.

Republicans 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 Affordable Care Act.

“Some things like means-testing may not save you a lot upfront but saves you a lot of money in the long run and does the most to help reduce the debt [rather] than, say, cutting discretionary spending,” Ryan said.

They want to eliminate social-services block grants and require a Social Security number to receive a child tax credit, according to the proposal.

Also being considered is a proposal to eliminate a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that would end regulators’ authority to seize and dismantle financial firms if their failure could damage the stability of the U.S. financial system.

Another proposal would gut mandatory spending for the Consumer Financial Protection Board and revise the federal employees retirement system.

Many proposals added to the debt-limit bill had passed the House previously and weren’t taken up by the Democratic-led Senate.

The measure won’t specify by how much the cap will be increased, rather that it will allow the government to borrow for a specified length of time, said Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican.

“It’s hard for us to know what the amount is because we don’t get the numbers in real time from the Treasury Department,” Cole said in an interview. “You don’t eliminate the debt ceiling, you just give the government the ability to borrow for a specified period.”

Obama, who has said repeatedly he will not negotiate over debt limit legislation, called Boehner late in the day to tell him that directly. The speaker expressed disappointment, his office said, and responded that Congress “will chart the path ahead.”

CRUZ THREATENS FILIBUSTER

Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., said his party wouldn’t vote to pass a clean spending bill. He wouldn’t speculate on what the House might insert. “We may have a shutdown temporarily,” he told reporters.

Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican and chief Senate opponent of the health law, said he’s willing to do “everything necessary and anything possible,” including holding a filibuster, to thwart action on the spending measure as a way to end funding for the healthcare law. He called Friday for party unity.

“Senate Republicans should stand side-by-side with courageous House Republicans,” Cruz said in a statement.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said in a statement that the House had voted to “follow the will of the American people,” adding that “the Senate should now follow suit.”

The Senate is expected to start considering the legislation Monday with goal of finishing by Thursday.

Democratic leaders are considering a procedural tactic that would put Cruz and his allies in an awkward spot and upend their efforts.

Under Senate rules, they could have a simple majority vote that would strip the health-care defunding language once they end debate on the House measure.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the party’s campaign arm, is targeting House members who voted Friday for the spending bill and who are running for the Senate from Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia. All are states that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney carried in the 2012 election.

“Democrats will hold Republicans accountable for their reckless plan to shut down the government and ignore the danger their actions pose to the country,” the Democratic committee said in a statement.

When asked about Republican leaders’ plans for dealing with the bill sent back from the Senate, Rep. Peter Roskam of Illinois said that there are “all sorts of things being discussed” to “get rid of Obamacare.” Roskam is the House Republicans’ chief deputy whip.

If Boehner allows the Senate bill to go forward, he would need enough Democratic votes to join Republicans to pass it and avoid a government shutdown.

House Republican leaders also could continue revising the measure and send the amended version back to the Senate for a vote, complicating the process and raising the risk of a shutdown as time runs out.

That’s the likely path, Hudson and Boustany said.

The House spending measure also includes a provision directing the Treasury on how to prioritize payments if the debt ceiling is breached.

House Republicans said they would start working next week on legislation to raise the nation’s debt limit and attach a one-year delay in the health law, cuts to entitlement programs and approval for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Ultimately, Hudson said, Obama will accept a delay of the health-care law.

“We can ultimately prevail on this if we stand tough,” he said. “We’re willing to give up quite a bit in negotiations, but we’ve got to get to the point where they believe they need to negotiate with us.”Information for this article was contributed by Roxana Tiron, Richard Rubin, Kathleen Hunter and Roger Runningen of Bloomberg News; by David Espo of The Associated Press; and by Jonathan Weisman, Ashley Parker and John Eligon of The New York Times.