As political bickering over a 2014 continuing resolution pushed the government shutdown into its second day on Wednesday, House Republicans show no signs of letting up on efforts to derail Obamacare.
Instead, the House Rules Committee will meet Wednesday morning to try and revive a couple of failed piecemeal bills that were rejected by the House a day earlier. Efforts to pass a series of mini-continuing resolution to restore funding to Veterans Affairs, national parks and the District of Columbia failed to get the two-thirds majority votes needed under the suspension rule.
The non-controversial measures, including one to fund the National Insitutes of Health, will be brought to the floor again under regular rules, with a majority vote needed to pass them.
Even if they had made the cut, Democrats said they would reject this approach to keeping the government open, and President Barack Obama said he would veto them.
“Speaker [John] Boehner has the votes to re-open the government and he knows it,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “By refusing to let the House vote on the only bill that will re-open the government, Speaker Boehner is singlehandedly keeping the government shut down. It is time for Speaker Boehner to stop the games, think about the people he is hurting, and let the House pass the Senate's bill to re-open the government with Republican and Democratic votes.”
The idea of a piecemeal approach to temporarily fund the government was a suggestion from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who took the lead on defunding Obamacare ahead of the budget debate. Cruz, a tea party-backed Republican, recently staged a filibuster in order to prevent cloture on the stopgap measure, much to the ire of his colleagues in both chambers.
“I think we ought to pass continuing resolution to fund every single priority that President Obama laid out,” Cruz told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday. “I agree with them. We should go forward and fund the national parks. (...) What I am saying is we should focus on areas of bipartisan agreement.
In a floor speech on Wednesday, Reid told House Republicans that “when your last brilliant plan comes from the same person who came up with the dumbest idea ever,” then they should know they are on the wrong track.
The 2013 government shutdown is the first in 17 years, with some 800,000 federal workers are expected to be furloughed.
Government Shutdown 2013: House Rules Committee Mulls Strategy For Failed Piecemeal Bills
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