House sends government spending bill to the Senate without Obamacare funding

The House on Friday approved a bill to temporarily fund the government that would strip funding for the 2010 federal health care law known as Obamacare, a move that will set up a showdown with the Senate next week that could result in a government shutdown.

The bill, which Democrats in the Senate plan to reject in its current form, would set spending levels at $986.3 billion through Dec. 15. Congress must pass a bill to set federal funding levels, known as a continuing resolution (CR) by Oct. 1, or the government will partially close. House Republicans see the mandatory deadline as a final opportunity to cripple the 3-year-old health care law.

The bill passed largely along party lines. Only two Democrats, Reps. Jim Matheson of Utah and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, voted for the CR.

While conservatives in the House see the passage of the bill as a victory, the celebration will be short-lived. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid intends to strip out the part of the bill that defunds the health care law when the upper chamber takes up the measure next week. In a statement Thursday, President Barack Obama vowed to veto any CR that does not include funding for the law.

The move by House Republicans comes amid a fierce internal party battle over how to tackle the Affordable Care, a law that was found constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2012. For months, Republican leaders resisted calls from conservative members in the House and Senate to use the CR as a vehicle to defund the law, but they relented this week by announcing that the bill sent to the Senate would not include funding for the law. They preferred, instead, to seek a delay of the law's individual mandate to purchase health insurance by tying it to a vote to raise the federal government's borrowing limit.

In the Senate, four Republicans, Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah, have led an aggressive effort to defund the health care law. They have enraged other Republicans by saying publicly that those who vote for government spending measures that include funding for Obamacare effectively support the Democratic health care law.

Anger within the GOP reached a tipping point this week when Cruz acknowledged that it would likely fail in the Senate after House leaders announced they would move forward with the ill-fated plan.

"Harry Reid will no doubt try to strip the defund language from the continuing resolution," Cruz said Wednesday. "And right now, he likely has the votes to do so."

The remark sparked an outpouring of fury from Republicans who accused him of giving up on the fight before the bill reached the Senate. (The anger seemed misplaced, as Cruz has acknowledged for months that Republicans do not have enough votes in the Senate to defund Obamacare.)

On Thursday, Cruz responded by suggesting that he may stage a traditional filibuster to block a Senate spending bill, saying that he would “do everything necessary and anything possible to defund Obamacare.”

Next week, he may have his chance. With the passage of the House bill on Friday, the battle over the Affordable Care Act and government spending will move to the Senate, where lawmakers will have only seven days to find a compromise with the House to avoid a shutdown.

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Top Senate Republican leaders do not support effort to filibuster spending bill

The Senate's two top Republican leaders on Monday put the kibosh on a call from some of their own members to defund Obamacare with a filibuster of a crucial operations budget.

Their move is in line with the increasing GOP consensus that shutting down the federal government to hobble the president's health care law is not a winning strategy for the party.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas both announced that they would vote to override a Republican filibuster of the Continuing Resolution (CR) that the House passed on Friday. That measure would fund the government through Dec. 15 but does not include funding for the 2010 American re.

“Sen. McConnell supports the House Republicans’ bill and will not vote to block it, since it defunds Obamacare and funds the government without increasing spending by a penny. He will also vote against any amendment that attempts to add Obamacare funding back into the House Republicans’ bill,” McConnell spokesman Don Stewart told Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper.

“If and when the Majority Leader goes down that path, Washington Democrats will have to decide — without hiding behind a procedural vote — whether or not to split with their leadership and join Republicans and their constituents in opposing the re-insertion of Obamacare funding into the House-passed bill.”

Earlier on Monday, Cornyn declared his intention public on his Twitter account:

“I intend to support the House bill that defunds Obamacare and will vote against a bill that funds it,” Cornyn said.

Both chambers of Congress and President Barack Obama must agree to a CR within the next week or risk a shutdown. The move makes it less likely that the federal government will face a shutdown when current funding levels expire on Oct. 1.

There are multiple reasons why Republicans would want to support cloture on the CR, which requires a 60-vote threshold: First, it allows them to go on the record in support of a bill that keeps the government open but also defunds Obamacare, which they point to when running for re-election. Once the Senate agrees to cloture, the final version — which will include Obamacare funding — will need only a simple majority to pass. Once it reaches that level in the process, Republicans will likely vote against it, knowing that there will be enough votes in the Democrat-controlled Senate to approve it.

The move, however, effectively rebukes a strategy to filibuster the bill, proposed by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who has spent the past several weeks urging his colleagues to defund the health care law.

The next major hurdle to avoiding a government shutdown is expected next week, when, assuming the Senate passes the CR without Obamacare funding, the bill will be returned to the Republican-led House.

The White House has drawn a line in the sand, saying President Barack Obama will not sign legislation that strips the funding from his signature domestic achievement, Obamacare, and that he will not negotiate over the debt limit.

Obama himself hammered the message home to Boehner in a Friday telephone call.

The president reiterated “his very firm views about the need to ensure that we don't inflict wounds on the economy unnecessarily by allowing the government to shut down,” press secretary Jay Carney said aboard Air Force One on Monday as Obama headed to the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Obama himself has previously said he will not trade for raising the debt limit — a step that allows the United States to pay for expenses that Congress has already run up, a bit like a credit card payment.

A senior administration official told Yahoo News that Obama would sign a short-term “continuing resolution” keeping funding levels at levels set in a 2011 spending compromise.

“It’s not controversial to suggest that that would be better than shutting down the government,” the official said. “In a normal world, this wouldn’t be particularly complicated.”

Olivier Knox contributed to this report.

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