Excerpt
SUMMARY: Ahead of votes in the House, senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer told Judy Woodruff the president will not sign any bill that delays or defunds health care reform, and called House Republican threats to force a government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act on the day insurance exchanges open a "tremendous irony."
"Pressure Mounting to Avert Shutdown, Lawmakers Stand Their Ground" PBS Newshour 9/30/2013
Excerpt
SUMMARY: With just hours left before a government shutdown, House Republicans passed another stopgap funding bill that included provisions to scale back the Affordable Care Act, despite the Senate and the president's refusal to support such a plan. Gwen Ifill reports on the day's back and forth leading up to the budget deadline.
"Government Shuts Down in Budget Impasse" by JONATHAN WEISMAN and JEREMY W. PETERS, New York Times 9/30/2013
Excerpt
A flurry of last-minute moves by the House, Senate and White House late Monday failed to break a bitter budget standoff over President Obama’s health care law, setting in motion the first government shutdown in nearly two decades.
The impasse meant that 800,000 federal workers were to be furloughed and more than a million others would be asked to work without pay. The Office of Management and Budget issued orders shortly before the midnight deadline that “agencies should now execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations” because Congress had failed to act to keep the federal government financed.
After a series of rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers, the House and Senate ended the day with no resolution, and the Senate halted business until later Tuesday while the House took steps to open talks. But Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, dismissed as game-playing the House proposal to begin conference committee negotiations.
“We will not go to conference with a gun to our heads,” he said, demanding that the House accept the Senate’s six-week stopgap spending bill, which has no policy prescriptions, before negotiations begin.
The Obama administration and the Republican-controlled House had come close to failing to finance the government in the past but had always reached a last-minute agreement to head off a disruption in government services.
In the hours leading up to the deadline, House Republican leaders won approval, in a vote of 228 to 201, of a new plan to tie further government spending to a one-year delay in a requirement that individuals buy health insurance. The House proposal would deny federal subsidies to members of Congress, Capitol Hill staff, executive branch political appointees, White House staff, and the president and vice president, who would be forced to buy their health coverage on the Affordable Care Act’s new insurance exchanges.
But 57 minutes later, and with almost no debate, the Senate killed the House health care provisions and sent the stopgap spending bill right back, free of policy prescriptions. Earlier in the day, the Senate had taken less than 25 minutes to convene and dispose of a weekend budget proposal by the House Republicans.
“They’ve lost their minds,” Mr. Reid said, before disposing of the House bill. “They keep trying to do the same thing over and over again.”
The federal government was then left essentially to run out of money at midnight, the end of the fiscal year, although the president signed a measure late Monday that would allow members of the military to continue to be paid.
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