WASHINGTON — The GOP-controlled House voted Friday to cripple President Barack Obama’s health care law as part of a risky ploy that threatens a partial shutdown of the government in a week and a half.
The fight is coming on a stopgap funding measure required to keep the government fully running after the Oct. 1 start of the new budget year. Typically, such measures advance with sweeping bipartisan support, but tea party activists forced GOP leaders — against their better judgment — to add a provision to cripple the health care law that is the signature accomplishment of Obama’s first term.
Republicans welcomed the vote, saying the new health care law is a disaster that is forcing cutbacks in workers’ hours, raising health insurance premiums and being implemented unfairly. House Republicans have voted more than 40 times to disable all or part of the health care law.
“There’s no reason the American people should have to face this train wreck,” said Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga.
The partisan 230-189 vote sets the stage for a confrontation with the Democratic-led Senate, which promises to strip the health care provision from the bill next week and challenge the House to pass it as a simple, straightforward funding bill that President Barack Obama will sign.
“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,” said Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The White House promises Obama will veto the measure in the unlikely event it reaches his desk.
At a post-vote rally by House Republicans, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, called the measure’s approval “a victory today for the American people” and turned the spotlight on the Democratic Senate.
“Our message to the United State Senate is real simple: The American people don’t want the government shut down, and they don’t want Obamacare,” he said to cheers from his GOP colleagues. “The House has listened to the American people. Now it’s time for the United States Senate to listen to them as well.”
The temporary funding bill is needed because Washington’s longstanding budget stalemate has derailed the annual appropriations bills required to fund federal agency operations.
The fight over the must-do funding bill comes as Washington is bracing for an even bigger battle over increasing the government’s borrowing cap to make sure the government can pay its bills. Democrats say they won’t be held hostage and allow Republicans to use the must-pass measures as leverage to win legislative victories that they otherwise couldn’t.
Obama said at a unionized Ford Motor Company plant in Liberty, Mo. , Friday: “If you don’t raise the debt ceiling, America can’t pay its bills.”
“If Congress doesn’t pass this debt ceiling in the next few weeks, the United States will default on its obligations. That’s never happened in American history. Basically, America becomes a deadbeat,” Obama said.
The No. 2 House Democrat, Steny Hoyer of Maryland said the GOP ploy is a “blatant act of hostage-taking” fueled by Republicans’ “destructive obsession with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and its unrestrained hostility towards government.”
Republicans countered that the measure is required to prevent a government shutdown that would delay pay for federal workers, send non-essential federal workers home, close national parks and shutter passport offices. Essential programs like air traffic control, food inspection and the Border Patrol would keep running, and Social Security benefits, Medicare and most elements of the new health care law would continue.
Even before Friday’s House vote, lawmakers were looking a couple of moves ahead on the congressional chessboard to a scenario in which the Democratic Senate would remove the “defund Obamacare” provision and kick the funding measure back to the House for a showdown next weekend.
GOP leaders haven’t said what they’ll do then, but with the deadline looming at midnight on Monday, Sept. 30, a further volley of legislative ping pong that prolongs the impasse could spark the first shutdown since the 1995-96 battle that helped resurrect President Bill Clinton’s popularity.
“We will not accept just a clean CR at this point. There will be a fight,” said Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., using shorthand for the stopgap spending bill, which is officially called a continuing resolution.
An earlier plan by Boehner and other GOP leaders was designed to send a straightforward bill to keep the government running through Dec. 15, but ran into too much opposition from tea party members who demanded a showdown over the Affordable Care Act, the official name of what Republicans have branded Obamacare.
Boehner has sought to reassure the public and financial markets that Republicans have no interest in either a partial government shutdown when the budget year ends or a first-ever default on a broader set of U.S. obligations when the government runs out of borrowing ability by mid- to late October.
“Let me be very clear,” Boehner said Thursday. “Republicans have no interest in defaulting on our debt — none.”
GOP leaders want to skirt the shutdown confrontation and seek concessions when addressing the need to raise the debt ceiling next month, but Obama says he won’t be forced into making concessions as he did in the 2011 debt crisis, when he accepted $2.1 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years.
Republicans held a meeting Friday morning with the rank and file to discuss the debt limit measure. Lawmakers said the GOP’s debt limit plan could permit new borrowing for a year, paired with a mandate to permit construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a framework to reform the loophole-cluttered U.S. tax code, limits on medical malpractice lawsuits and higher Medicare premiums for higher-income beneficiaries. Even with the grab bag of GOP chestnuts, some ardent conservatives are likely to balk at voting for any debt limit measure.
At the very least, Republicans want to cause political pain for vulnerable Senate Democrats. At their rally Friday, Republicans cheered as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., cited four Senate Democrats who face re-election next year in GOP-leaning and said he wanted to know where each stands on Obama’s health care law.
The four were Sens. Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas.
In interviews Thursday, Pryor and Begich indicated that they did not support the effort to defund the health care law.
“We voted on Obamacare,” Pryor said. “It’s the law of the land; it’s been to the Supreme Court. It’s not perfect, but let’s work to make it better, don’t repeal it.”
