US government shutdown likely
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Washington (dpa) - The US House of Representatives early Sunday approved a budget bill that is headed for rejection by the Senate and the White House, setting up a likely government shutdown early next week with potentially damaging economic consequences.
The Republican majority added two controversial amendments to a budget previously approved in the Senate. The move would delay until January 2015 the implementation of President Obama's signature health insurance reform plan.
The House also voted 248-174 to kill a 2.3-per-cent tax on medical devices intended to help fund the insurance programme.
The revised budget, which would provide short-term funding for three months, will be sent back to the Senate for another round of voting. But Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, has said the Senate will reject the amended budget and the White House signalled that Obama would veto the bill even if the Senate approved it.
The Senate will reconvene at 1800 GMT Monday, hours before the budget deadline of midnight Monday (0400 Tuesday.)
Representative David Scott, a Democrat, called the House vote against health reform "one of the darkest moments of American history."
"It's the law. It has been held up by the Supreme Court. It has been debated in the (2012) elections. The people spoke. The American people are never going to forget that it was you that shut down the government," Scott said, pointing to the Republicans.
Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is called, is a red flag for Republicans, who, having failed to convince the Democrat-controlled Senate to de-fund the provisions in at least 40 previous votes, are holding it hostage in the budget wrangling.
Obama and Reid have charged that Republicans were violating the principles of democracy by forcing the costly and economy-damaging shutdown if they did not get their way in gutting or delaying the 2010 law.
"No one gets to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States of America just to extract ideological concessions," Obama declared.
Republicans rejected the idea that they would be responsible for a shutdown, claiming that Saturday's budget amendments were in fact a compromise that would simply delay Obamacare instead of gutting it - a Republican proposal that was already rejected Friday by the Senate.
In a show of support for the military, the House unanimously adopted a measure that would provide continuing pay for defence forces in case of a shutdown.
The budget issue has fractured the Republican Party between moderates like Senator John McCain, who worry about the political consequences, and the anti-government Tea Party conservatives whom one Democrat charged were "cheering" the prospect of the shutdown.
When Congressional Republicans shut down the government in 1995, they suffered huge political losses at the next election. Reid called the House vote "pointless" and the work of "anarchists."
The stalemate marks the second time that Tea Party Republicans - a minority within their own party - have brought the government to the brink of crisis. In 2011, the fight was over the debt ceiling and fiscal cutbacks, and a compromise was reached. But the government
suffered a markdown in its credit rating.
This year, the Senate and House of Representatives mostly agreed on the budget numbers, but not on Republican demands to erode Obamacare. In mid October, another fiscal standoff looms when Tea Party activists threaten to oppose raising the government's borrowing limit unless they get their way on legislative issues.
The consequence of a government shutdown on Tuesday could be drastic, warned Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur. She cited a Moody's rating agency projection that a shutdown of three to four weeks would cut US economic growth by as much as half.
In the 1995 shutdown, 800,000 government workers were furloughed for about a month. Democrats warned that everything from border security in the south-west to security for diplomats overseas and national parks would suffer. Government employees deemed "essential" would have to continue working without pay.
Obamacare will extend health insurance to some of the 40 million people who have no coverage. The programme, which Obama has declared will go into effect on Tuesday even if the government closes down, would operate through a marketplace of private insurers.
Republicans charge that insurance programme is the equivalent of socialized medicine and will increase health care costs. Republican Representative Pete Sessions called it an "attack and assault on the free enterprise system and the free economy."
