No compromise: Government on brink of a shutdown?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Moving closer to the brink of a government shutdown, House Republicans vowed Thursday they won’t simply accept the stopgap legislation that is likely to remain after Senate Democrats strip away a plan to dismantle President Barack Obama’s health care law.

The defiant posture sets the stage for weekend drama on Capitol Hill after the Senate sends the fractious House a straightforward bill to keep the government operating through Nov. 15 rather than partly closing down at midnight Monday. The Senate is likely to act Friday after Democrats use their procedural advantages to remove the House’s tea party-inspired provision to “defund Obamacare.”

Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and several rank-and-file Republicans said the House simply won’t accept a “clean” spending measure, even though that’s been the norm in Congress on dozens of occasions since the 1995-96 government closures that bruised Republicans and strengthened the hand of Democratic President Bill Clinton.

“I don’t see that happening,” Boehner said. Still, he declared that “I have no interest in a government shutdown” and he doesn’t expect one to occur on Tuesday.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the Democratic-led chamber will not relent.

“The Senate will never pass a bill that guts the Affordable Care Act,” Reid declared.

A partial government shutdown would keep hundreds of thousands of federal workers off the job, close national parks and generate damaging headlines for whichever side the public held responsible.

Washington faces two deadlines: The Oct. 1 start of the new budget year and a mid-October date — now estimated for the 17th — when the government can no longer borrow money to pay its bills on time and in full.

The first deadline requires Congress to pass a spending bill to allow agencies to stay open. The mid-month deadline requires Congress to increase the government’s $16.7 trillion borrowing cap to avoid a first-ever default on its payments, which include interest obligations, Social Security benefits, payments to thousands of contractors large and small, and salaries for the military.

The standoff just four days before the end of the fiscal year increased the possibility of a shutdown, with no signs of compromise.

The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said that because of the time it takes the Senate to approve even non-controversial bills, if the House amends a Senate-passed spending bill and returns it to the Senate over the weekend, “That is a concession on their part that we’re going to shut down the government.”

Not far from the Capitol, at a community college in Largo, Md., Obama insisted he would not negotiate over his signature domestic achievement, either on a bill to keep the government operating or legislation to raise the nation’s borrowing authority.

“The entire world looks to us to make sure that the world economy is stable. You don’t mess with that,” Obama said of the debt ceiling/default measure. “And that’s why I will not negotiate on anything when it comes to the full faith and credit of the United States of America.”

Responding to Obama’s non-negotiable stand, Boehner said, “Well, I’m sorry but it just doesn’t work that way.”

House GOP leaders said Thursday they would unveil their own legislation to lift the government’s borrowing cap through December of next year, but only if the new health care law is delayed for a year.

Meeting behind closed doors, House Republican leaders encountered resistance from their rank and file over their measure even though they were attaching a list of other Republican favorites such as green-lighting the Keystone XL oil pipeline, blocking federal regulation of greenhouse gases and boosting offshore oil exploration.

Republicans who lost the presidential election and a shot at Senate control last year are trying to use must-pass measures to advance agenda items that the Democratic-led Senate and Obama have soundly rejected. The last-ditch effort on “Obamacare” comes just days before coast-to-coast enrollment in the plan’s health care exchanges begins Oct. 1.

Despite the popular items, the leadership was struggling to win over its recalcitrant GOP members, especially tea party-backed lawmakers pressing for deeper, deficit-cutting spending measures. The spending cuts the Republicans would attach to the debt-limit legislation would be likely to represent a small fraction of the almost $1 trillion in new borrowing authority the bill would permit.

“Among conservatives, there’s a lot of angst about that,” said Rep. John Fleming, R-La.

Proposed changes include requiring federal workers to contribute more to their pensions, along with other items from a failed 2011 deficit-cutting effort.

Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., said he didn’t “see hardly any cuts in there.” The lawmaker said, “Are there a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts? We dropped most of the entitlement stuff out of there. There’s not much in there.”

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, insisted that the House accept the Senate bill.

“Republicans have got to put an end to the tea party temper tantrums and pass our bill without any gimmicks and without any games,” she said.

Rep. Charles Dent, R-Pa., one of the more moderate House Republicans, said his colleagues may not have a choice under the time constraints and the desire to avoid a shutdown, especially if the House gets a bill on Monday — the last day of the fiscal year.

“I’m concerned” that Boehner may not have the votes to do that, Dent said. “I’m not at the point of pants-on-fire yet, or hair-on-fire.”