Congress at impasse as House pushes to delay Obamacare
National parks, federal offices ordered to close as lawmakers fail to agree on a stopgap bill to fund the government.- Live from Senate floor
Senate rejects latest House proposal; federal government closes for first time in 17 years
The U.S. government on Tuesday shut down for the first time in 17 years, after a Congress bitterly divided over President Obama’s signature health-care initiative failed to reach agreement to fund federal agencies.
Thousands of government workers arrived at federal office buildings to clean off their desks, set out-of-office e-mail messages and make whatever arrangements were necessary to stay off the job indefinitely. Others, including Border Patrol officers, prison guards and air traffic controllers, were required to work but were told they may not be paid.Sign up for ‘The Showdown’ newsletter
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Government shutdown: What’s open, what’s closed
A look at the the services and facilities that will be open in the event of a government shutdown.
Congress stuck in stalemate as federal shutdown begins
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed as agencies, national parks forced to close.
United on who’s to blame for shutdown: The other side
Democrats and Republicans, aware of what’s at stake in the coming messaging war, hone their strategies.
As government shuts down, Obamacare moves forward
A key part of the health-care overhaul takes effect, but the law still faces challenges of historic proportions.
On Capitol’s last tour, visitors see a calm before the closure
‘This is a great teaching moment in American democracy,’ says a guide, who faced being unable to work soon.
Washington’s iconic memorials were shuttered, along with Smithsonian museums and national parks across the country. By mid-morning, some frustrated federal workers were already waiting for Metro trains to take them back home. With no way of knowing whether they would be shut out of work for a few days or several weeks, some of the workers carrying potted plants from their offices with them.
“Let’s fire ’em all-- we need to get rid of them,” Teresa Washington, an Environmental Protection Agency worker, said about the lawmakers whose actions — or inaction — spurred the shutdown. “It’s not fair. They still get paychecks and we don’t.”
[Read the latest updates on the shutdown here.]
The Democratic-controlled Senate rejected a request by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives for a special conference committee to resolve differences on how to fund the government, including whether to link funding to changes in the health-care law.
Senate leaders say they are willing to have a conference committee — and have been asking Republicans for months to form one to discuss a full-year budget. But they refuse to have a conference while the government is shut down, and will not allow the Republicans to continue to pair the issue of government funding with changes in the health-care law.
‘The government is closed. . .because of the irrationality of what is going on on the other side of the Capitol” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said after the party-line vote.
[Sights of the shutdown]
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blamed his Democratic colleagues for the impasse, saying they should relent and consider the House proposals. Those proposals, he said, contain significant compromises because of a narrowing of the proposed changes in the health-care legislation.
The latest budget legislation passed by House — hours before Monday’s midnight deadline — sought to undermine the Affordable Care Act by delaying enforcement of the “individual mandate,” a cornerstone of the law that requires all Americans to obtain health insurance. The measure also sought to strip lawmakers and their aides of long-standing government health benefits.
It was quickly rejected by the Senate.
Reid urged House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to abandon the assault on the health-care law and pass a simple bill to keep the government open. Otherwise, Reid warned, “the responsibility for this Republican government shutdown will rest squarely on his shoulders.”
Shortly before midnight, the White House budget office issued a memo instructing agencies to “execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations.”
‘This is a great teaching moment in American democracy,’ says a guide, who faced being unable to work soon.
The impasse means 800,000 federal workers will be furloughed. The National Institutes of Health will stop answering its hotlines and accepting new patients for clinical trials; the Justice Department will continue criminal law enforcement but suspend many civil cases; and regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency will close down almost entirely.
Many congressional hearings — including one scheduled for Tuesday on last month’s Washington Navy Yard shootings — are being postponed.
[More on how the shutdown will work.]
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said that the angry stalemate should serve as a warning to lawmakers and the American people, especially with another major fiscal battle — over the $16.7 trillion federal debt limit — on the horizon.
The Treasury Department will begin running short of cash to pay the nation’s bills as soon as Oct. 17 unless Congress approves additional borrowing authority. With so little time remaining to avoid what would be the nation’s first default, Democratic aides predicted that negotiations to reopen the government may be merged into the debt-limit talks.
The failure of a group of more moderate Republicans to step forward and join Democrats in supporting a clean funding bill, Hoyer said, “is a harbinger of a destabilizing confrontation” on the debt ceiling as well.
Congress on Monday approved and sent to the White House an agreement to keep issuing military paychecks. But Obama warned that the broader economy, which is finally starting to recover from the shocks of the past six years, would take a substantial hit if congressional gridlock shutters “America’s largest employer.”
“Keeping the people’s government open is not a concession to me. Keeping vital services running and hundreds of thousands of Americans on the job is not something you ‘give’ to the other side. It’s our basic responsibility,” Obama said in a statement Monday evening at the White House.
Privately, senior Republicans predicted that the closure would last at least a week. A fraction of today’s House Republicans were on Capitol Hill in 1995 and 1996 when a Republican-led Congress last shut down the government in a dispute over the budget with a Democratic president. Younger lawmakers don’t remember the pain the shutdown caused constituents, senior Republicans said. And many of them now question the conventional wisdom that the closures weakened the GOP presidential candidate in 1996 and nearly cost the party control of the House.
On Monday evening, Obama telephoned Boehner to urge him to reconsider his stance on the health-care law. In a call that lasted nearly 10 minutes, according to Boehner’s office, the president reiterated his insistence that there would be no negotiations over the debt limit, and that Congress must pay the bills it has incurred.
Boehner responded by mocking Obama in a speech on the House floor.
“ ‘I’m not going to negotiate,’ ” he said, quoting Obama. “I would say to the president: This is not about me. It’s not about Republicans here in Congress. It’s about fairness.”
The speech drew applause for the embattled speaker, who argued passionately that Republicans were merely seeking “fairness” for working people. Obama has delayed a mandate for employers to insure workers and delayed other requirements for big unions, Boehner said. “Yet they stick our constituents with a bill they don’t like and a bill they can’t afford,” he said.‘This is a great teaching moment in American democracy,’ says a guide, who faced being unable to work soon.
Despite the show of unity, Republicans on both sides of the Capitol remain deeply divided about the attack on the health-care law. In the House, a group of more moderate Republicans was seething about the decision to bow to the forces that oppose the Affordable Care Act, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and his allies on the right, including such outside groups as Heritage Action for America.
On Monday, some publicly urged Boehner to drop the issue and seek the help of House Democrats to pass the simple government-funding bill that the Senate approved last week.
“I don’t want to shut down the government,” said Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), who is trying to become her state’s first GOP senator since the 1950s, adding that she was inclined to support a “clean” funding bill.
Frustrations also were simmering among Senate Republicans, who complained that House leaders were pressing the attack in direct opposition to public opinion. Polls show that voters overwhelmingly disapprove of using the threat of a shutdown to defund the health-care law and that blame for a shutdown will fall squarely on Republicans.
“By wanting to repeal Obamacare using this method, it defies what the popular will is,” said Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, who campaigned last year on behalf of his party’s national ticket.
“I campaigned in 2012 all over this country for months: ‘Repeal and replace Obamacare.’ That was not the mandate of the voters,” McCain said. “If they wanted to repeal Obamacare, the 2012 election would have been probably significantly different.”
Democrats, meanwhile, were united against any attempt by Republicans to extract concessions now, especially with the larger fight over the debt limit swiftly approaching.
“The bottom line is very simple,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). “You negotiate on this, they will up the ante for the debt limit.”
Ed O’Keefe, Rosalind S. Helderman, Jackie Kucinich and Jeff Simon contributed to this report.
What the shutdown means for federal employees
FAQ | How do you know whether to report to the office, and will you get paid?What happens now that the government has shut down?
LIVE Q&A, NOW | Post reporters discuss what services are affected, how federal workers will be impacted and anything else you want to know.COPY http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/
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