President Obama Presses Congressional Leaders To Avoid Government Shutdown
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Prodded by an insistent President Barack Obama, Congress' top two lawmakers sought to reinvigorate compromise talks Tuesday aimed at cutting tens of billions in federal spending and averting a partial government shutdown Friday at midnight.
There was at least a hint of flexibility, accompanied by sharply partisan attacks and an outburst of shutdown brinksmanship.
According to Democrats, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, suggested at a White House meeting that fellow Republicans might be able to accept a deal with $40 billion in cuts. That's more than negotiators had been eyeing but less than the House seeks.
The speaker's office declined comment, and Boehner issued a statement saying, "We can still avoid a shutdown, but Democrats are going to need to get serious about cutting spending - and soon."
For his part, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid sounded an accusatory note. "I hope the Republicans do what the country needs, not what they believe the tea party wants," he said at the Capitol
"I mean, it seems that every step we take, it's something just to poke us in the eye," he said.
Boehner and Reid met privately later in the day. While there was no indication of substantive progress, there was a marked change in tone afterwards.
Spokesmen for the two issued identical statements, shorn of partisan bickering, saying the two leaders "had a productive discussion. They agreed to continue working on a budget solution."
Obama stepped forcefully into the dispute, at times sounding like an exasperated parent.
He convened a meeting at the White House with the chief congressional antagonists, rejected a Republican proposal for an interim bill with sharp cuts and then announced Boehner and Reid would meet later in the day.
If they can't sort out their differences, he said, "I want them back here tomorrow."
And if that doesn't work, he added, "we'll invite them again the day after that. And I will have my entire team available to work through the details of getting a deal done."
Obama, eager to regain the confidence of independent voters as he seeks a new term, said the American public expects that its leaders "act like grown-ups, and when we are in negotiations like this, that everybody gives a little bit, compromises a little bit in order to do the people's business."
At issue is legislation needed to keep the government running through the Sept. 30 end of the budget year, and a desire by all sides to avoid being blamed politically if there is a shutdown.
Twin closures in the mid-1990s boomeranged on Republicans when Newt Gingrich was speaker, helping Bill Clinton win re-election in 1996.
This year, both the White House and lawmakers have used the threat of a shutdown to seek leverage in the talks.
Republicans issued a 13-page pamphlet during the day providing guidance to congressional offices on operations during a shutdown. Boehner's office said Monday night the document had been prepared "in the event Senate Democrats shut down the government."
Reid's spokesman, Jon Summers, likened the maneuver to a "dress rehearsal for a shutdown that the tea party so desires."
But one Republican official said it was a response to a memo on Monday distributed by Jeffrey Zients, deputy director of Obama's Office of Management and Budget.
Zients wrote that all parties wish to avoid a shutdown but, "given the realities of the calendar, good management requires that we continue contingency planning for an orderly shutdown should the negotiations not be completed by ... this coming Friday."
New to power, House Republicans grabbed onto the need for a spending bill last January as a way to force spending cuts on reluctant Democrats and the president. An initial House-passed measure, which included $61 billion in cuts and dozens of unrelated provisions, drew a veto threat from Obama and fell short of the 60 votes needed for passage in the Senate.
At the same time, several Senate Democrats joined with Republicans to reject an alternative measure to continue spending at current levels – a post-election signal that they, too, wanted to see cuts take effect.
In the weeks since, Congress has approved two stopgap bills, containing a total of $10 billion in cuts at Republican insistence, and Obama has signed both into law.
In the interim, talks on the longer-term bill have grown increasingly acrimonious. Democrats said Boehner would eventually have to part company from tea party-backed lawmakers who propelled Republicans to power, and they accused him of reneging on an agreement to cut $33 billion.
In return, Republicans accused Democrats of resorting to budget gimmicks to make it look like they favored deep cuts, when in fact they sought higher spending.
On Monday, Boehner informed rank-and-file Republicans he would seek passage of a new stopgap bill, a week-long measure that includes $12 billion in cuts and funds the Defense Department through the end of the year.
Obama rejected it. He said he would sign an interim bill only if one were needed to get the paperwork together on a broader agreement and pass it through both houses.
"What we're not going to do is to once again put off something that should have gotten done several months ago," he said. Obama didn't say so, but that was an implied jab at Democrats, who had control of both houses of Congress last year and were unable to pass a budget or any of the 12 annual spending bills.
From the ABC World News interview: President Obama: Oh, absolutely not. Look if you look at my speech yesterday it was not so much a critique of what the House Republicans have proposed as it was a description of what they’ve proposed. Video courtesy of ABC World News: HuffPost's Laura Bassett reports: Reuters reports that without bill approval, funding for agencies may have expired: After months of wrangling between Democrats and Republicans, the Senate voted 81 to 19 in favor of the budget bill for the rest of this fiscal year. Passage came shortly after the House of Representatives voted 260-167 for the measure. Without approval of this bill, U.S. government funding for most agencies would have expired at midnight on Friday. More here. The Washington Post offers a graph of how the House voted on the 2011 budget (260-167 in favor). View the graph here. The Hill reports that the Senate has passed the spending bill in an 81 to 19 bipartisan vote: "It represents bipartisan agreement reached between leaders in the House, the White House and the Senate with the details being worked out by members of appropriations,†said Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) in calling on his colleagues to support the bill Thursday afternoon. “It includes cuts bigger than what I was comfortable with, but it is dramatically superior to what passed through the House months ago and equally superior to not passing a budget." More here. The Hill reports that the Senate has defeated resolutions to block funding for Planned Parenthood and healthcare: The House passed both resolutions just hours before. Votes on the defunding measures in both the House and the Senate were a condition Republicans insisted upon as part of last week's agreement with the White House and Democrats on funding for the rest of FY 2011. The Senate defeated the Planned Parenthood amendment by a 42 to 58 vote. The House passed that resolution 240-185. The Senate defeated the bill to defund the healthcare law, 47 to 53. The House passed that resolution 245-189. Both measures were required to meet a 60-vote threshold. More here. ThinkProgress posts on Twitter: Rep. Nancy Pelosi speaks out against GOP efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. The caption under the video reads: Planned Parenthood health centers currently provide preventive services to millions of women in need of health care, including the provision of contraception, cancer screenings, breast exams, and HIV testing. HuffPost's Jason Linkins reports: Lindsey Graham has styled himself as the Senate's great dealmaker -- the guy who will shepherd your measure through the partisan thicket and make sure it passes. All you have to do is do everything precisely the way Graham imagines it needs to be done, and you'll be fine. But the moment you hit one of his cryptic procedural tripwires -- ones you often didn’t know were laid in the first place -- Graham goes into full-on snit-fit mode, and vows to use whatever means at his disposal to shut the whole process down. He's doing it again over the budget deal that was wrought April 8, because it cut an allocation that was to be used to fund an Army Corps of Engineers project that would have deepened the Port of Charleston. Read more here. President Obama offered the following statement on Thursday, provided by the White House Press Office: “Today, I was pleased to take another step to relieve unnecessary burdens on small businesses by signing H.R. 4 into law. Small business owners are the engine of our economy and because Democrats and Republicans worked together, we can ensure they spend their time and resources creating jobs and growing their business, not filling out more paperwork. I look forward to continuing to work with Congress to improve the tax credit policy in this legislation and I am eager to work with anyone with ideas about how we can make health care better or more affordable.†The White House has provided the following press release: H.R. 4, the “Comprehensive 1099 Taxpayer Protection and Repayment of Exchange Subsidy Overpayments Act of 2011,†which repeals the expansion in the Affordable Care Act of requirements for businesses to report information to the Internal Revenue Service on payments for goods of $600 or more annually to other businesses and increases the amount of overpayment subject to repayment of premium assistance tax credits for health insurance coverage purchases through the Exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act. CNN radio reporter Lisa Desjardins writes on Twitter: ThinkProgress reports that Sen. Grassley has flip-flopped on his debt ceiling position: More here. The bill Obama signed Thursday repeals a provision that would have forced millions of businesses to file tax forms for every vendor selling them more than $600 in goods each year, starting in 2012. The filing requirement is unrelated to health care. However, it would have been used to pay for part of the new health law by ensuring that vendors pay taxes. Republicans hope it is the first of many such bills, resulting in the entire health care law being scrapped. Democrats say the bill is part of an inevitable tinkering that will be needed to improve the health measure. More here. HuffPost's Elise Foley reports: Nearly half of the House Republicans who opposed a budget deal on Thursday were freshmen, many of whom were voted into office in November by a surge in support for Tea Party candidates. The “no†votes from GOP freshman only made up about 30 percent of the overall class, most of which supported the bill. Still, a number of freshmen said they were disappointed by the deal struck last week by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the White House. The final deal cut about $38 billion from current spending levels -- much of it through budget gimmicks -- and blocked funding to certain programs. But the scope and level of the cuts were far lower than in the original House funding bill, which would have cut about $61 billion from the 2011 budget and slashed funding for Obama’s health care law, Planned Parenthood, and the Environmental Protection Agency. For some freshmen Republicans, already skeptical of the deal, the final nail in the coffin was a report on Wednesday that claimed the bill cut only $352 million from the deficit this year -- a far cry from the $38 billion promised. “It certainly didn’t help,†Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) said of the article. Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) told HuffPost he was disappointed with “a lot of things†about the funding deal, from the closed-door negotiations to the final total cut. “The numbers continued to dissipate. We came here and people said $100 billion, then it goes down to 61, then it goes down to this, and it goes down to that,†West said before the vote. “We’re letting the American people down.†Huizenga, West and 26 other freshmen joined with longer-serving conservative Republicans such as Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Steve King (Iowa), Michele Bachmann (Minn.) and Mike Pence (Ind.) to vote against the bill. Other freshmen GOP members said they were unhappy with the final deal, but would still support it. Pennsylvanian Rep. Lou Barletta said he was displeased with cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, but had to swallow concerns to support the bill. “It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly far from what they would like to do around here, and that’s spend more,†he said referring his Democratic rivals. WASHINGTON — Tough re-election campaigns looming, a handful of moderate Senate Democrats on Thursday choose between voting to cut off funds for President Barack Obama's health care law or showing their continued their support for the increasingly unpopular law. The deal on the spending bill struck by Obama, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., requires a separate vote on cutting off money for the year-old health care overhaul. The effort is expected to fall short in the Senate, but it will put lawmakers on record – a prospect Republicans looking ahead to 2012 relish. Moderate Democrats such as Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska stood with Obama and Democratic leaders in endorsing the health care law. Abandoning it now would draw charges of flip-flopping while voting to keep the cash flowing could engender voters' wrath. "People are going to have to make a tough choice, but they're going to be held accountable either way," said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the committee that helps Republicans get elected to the Senate. Referring to the original votes on the law, Cornyn said, "It's a dilemma of their own making." McCaskill, Tester and Nelson have drawn GOP rivals in states that either trend heavily Republican (Montana and Nebraska) or stand as electoral battlegrounds (Missouri). Freshman Sen. Joe Manchin has no announced foes in West Virginia and remains popular, but his state voters strongly backed Republican presidential nominee John McCain over Obama by 13 percentage points in 2008. More here. HuffPost's Amanda Terkel reports: With many pro-choice advocates upset that the budget deal included restrictions on access to abortion in D.C., 33 Democratic House members voted against the legislation today. One of those lawmakers was House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who tweeted, "I voted no on the CR today-we can do better by women, students, #DC and investing in our future." Thirteen Democratic women voted for the bill. HuffPost Blogger Rep. Carolyn Maloney writes: The Republicans seem to have a bit of a problem these days with truth in advertising. Because, for all their nice soundbites and talking points about reducing the deficit and creating jobs, the Republican Roadmap to Prosperity is most notable for two things. If followed, it would increase the deficit and kill American jobs. The GOP's widely advertised, surefire method of deficit reduction is not unlike those late night TV infomercials that claim "you can shed those ugly pounds fast without dieting or exercise!" Ask any real doctor and they will tell you that without a responsible program of exercise and diet, the only surefire path to weight loss would be disease. And in fact, a grim variety of social illness is pretty much what the Republicans are pitching. They are trying to sell you a plan to put all the burden of getting our financial house in order on the middle class, the poor, the disadvantaged, the infirm and the elderly. More here. CNN reports on elements of the budget deal agreed upon in the House today: As part of the agreement, Congress is also scheduled to vote Thursday on measures to de-fund Planned Parenthood and Obama's health care overhaul. While the bills are expected to pass the House, they have virtually no chance of clearing the Democratic-controlled Senate. "There are some who claim that the spending cuts in this bill ... are gimmicks," he said on the House floor. "I just think it is total nonsense. A cut is a cut." More here. HuffPost's Jason Linkins writes: Wednesday, Politico offered President Obama some advice on how to approach his afternoon deficit speech in a piece titled "7 things Obama needs to do." And for some reason, MediaMatters' Simon Maloy actually read the damn thing, and was surprised to learn that the piece actually offered all sorts of conflicting advice -- almost as if Politico should maybe stay out of this whole "advice to presidents" game. How conflicting was it? In the second paragraph, they advise the president to "signal to Republicans that he's open to compromise." In paragraph 5, they caution "no matter what Obama says Wednesday, he won't go far enough to satisfy most Republicans." Which would tend to make the whole "signalling an openness to compromise" part a pretty useless endeavor. More here. Politico reports that Republicans had to reach out to Democrats in order to pass Thursday's vote in the House: With 59 Republicans defecting, Boehner and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) knew that help was needed, but the dynamics were such that Democrats held back to milk the crisis facing the GOP. Ultimately 81 Democrats — many of whom had planned to do so all week — joined in support, but the majority only cast their votes in the final minute. More here. ABC News Correspondent Jonathan Karl writes on Twitter: HuffPost's Jon Ward writes on Twitter: The Washington Post writes about the budget deal recently approved by the House: On a 260-167 vote, a bipartisan coalition supported the plan, as conservatives revolted over what they considered budgeting gimmicks and liberals opposed the plan as too draconian in its impact on programs that benefit lower-income individuals. The Senate will take up the measure Thursday evening and is expected to pass it on a large bipartisan vote, sending it to the White House for President Obama’s signature in time to meet the Friday midnight deadline for when the current funding resolution expires. More here. HuffPost's Sam Stein writes on Twitter:George Stephanopoulos: I know you just told Erskine Bowles and Senator Simpson, you want to get these talks moving right away. But boy, it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be easy. Paul Ryan. Spent a lot of time with him yesterday. The Congressman has really come out with a tough response to your speech. Let me-- I want to quote it exactly. He said, "The President was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate. Instead of building bridges, the President is poisoning wells." Are you poisoning wells?
The Congress on Thursday approved $38 billion in spending cuts this year as part of a bill to fund the federal government through September 30, sending the legislation to President Barack Obama to sign into law.
H.R. 1473 will cut $39.9 billion from the remaining six-months of the 2011 budget if it is signed by President Obama as expected.
The Senate on Thursday defeated two resolutions to amend the fiscal year 2011 spending bill that would have blocked funding for Planned Parenthood, and all funds to implement last year's healthcare reform law.
@ thinkprogress :
Senate rejects defunding Planned Parenthood 42-58. 5 Republicans voted no.
Today, House Republicans passed H.Con.Res. 36, a concurrent resolution that would "correct the enrollment" of the Continuing Resolution (H.R. 1473), by adding a section at the end of the bill to defund Planned Parenthood. Cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood would have a devastating impact on women's health care across the country.
WATCH:
On Thursday, April 14, 2011, the President signed into law:
@ LisaDCNN :
SENATE VOTES 47-53 against defunding the health care bill.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), in keeping with other GOP lawmakers, recently stated that the GOP should not vote to increase the debt limit unless Democrats and President Obama make major concessions on federal spending cuts. That position, however, is exactly opposite the one he took in 2006, when he urged his Senate colleagues to unanimously vote to increase the debt limit, saying it should not be used “to control government debt and deficits.â€
@ senatus :
Budget votes, beginning w/ correcting resolutions, now underway in the Senate.
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has signed the first rollback of last year's health care law, a bipartisan repeal of a burdensome tax-reporting requirement that's widely unpopular with businesses.
Under the deal, $38.5 billion would be from the budget for the remainder the fiscal year, which ends September 30. Among other things, the package slashes funding from a wide range of domestic programs and services, including high-speed rail, emergency first responders, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) stepped forward to support the package together with old Democratic allies on the House Appropriations Committee. Across the aisle, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — who bore the brunt of the dissent as fellow leaders stood silently by — bluntly told his colleagues: “This is the best we could get out of divided government.â€
@ jonkarl :
Initial count: 60 Republican freshman voted YES on the spending deal. Only 27 voted no.
@ jonward11 :
RT @sethdmichaels: RT @2chambers The deal has passed, 260 to 167. With six not voting. 59 Rs voted no, 81 Dems voted yes.
@ NancyPelosi :
I voted no on the CR today-we can do better by women, students, #DC and investing in our future.
Eliminating any threat of a government shutdown until the fall, the House on Thursday approved a funding plan that reduces federal agency budgets by more than $38 billion for the second half of the year.
@ samsteinhp :
this thing passed.
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AP/The Huffington Post By DAVID ESPO First Posted: 04/06/11 03:16 AM ET Updated: 06/05/11 06:12 AM ET