- By
- SIOBHAN HUGHES
- And
- JANET HOOK
- CONNECT
House Republicans will try again with a strategy of funding the government piece by piece, holding votes on bills to fund parks, veterans' services, and Washington, D.C. Two new spending measures have been added to the lineup: one to pay military reservists during the shutdown and another to fund the National Institutes of Health, countering a Democratic talking point that Republicans were blocking money for cancer research.
With the government shutdown stretching into a second day, President Barack Obama cut short a trip to Asia, canceling visits to Malaysia and the Philippines. On Wednesday, Mr. Obama is to meet with a group of banking chief executives to talk about how the U.S. is close to running out of ways to meet its financial obligations. Treasury officials have said the debt ceiling will be reached in mid-October.
The crux of the shutdown fight is House Republicans' insistence that the spending bill include provisions to delay or ditch Mr. Obama's 2010 health-care law and Democrats' refusal to pass a short-term government spending bill with any policy initiatives. With both sides far apart and a looming deadline to increase the borrowing limit, more lawmakers see the shutdown fight merging with the debt debate.
"How do we get out of it? I think if they can somehow combine this with an agreement to bring up certain issues on the debt ceiling," Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) said Wednesday on MSNBC. "Something has to be done."
The new calls for a fix come a day after House Republicans launched a strategy to turn up pressure on Senate Democrats to come to the negotiating table, only to see it fail in their own chamber Tuesday night. GOP leaders tried to advance a series of short-term bills to finance small parts of the government, including veterans' services and national parks, through Dec. 15.
None of the bills garnered the two-thirds support needed under an expedited process chosen by GOP leaders to highlight House Democrats' unwillingness to fund the popular programs. GOP lawmakers are expected to bring up the bills again, this time using procedures that would allow them to pass with just the Republican majority. Senate Democrats have already said they will reject the bills because they want all parts of the federal government to reopen, not just select pieces.
On Wednesday, Republicans and Democrats took to the airwaves and suggested they see little chance of a quick resolution.
"When the crisis hits a certain point, we come together and have a breakthrough, and that's what we're going to have to have here," Sen. Dan Coats (R., Ind.) said in an interview with an Indiana radio station. He blamed Mr. Obama, saying that the president would only negotiate policy differences under pressure and otherwise ignored Republicans, who control only the House of Representatives but not the Senate or the White House. "If we don't have some pressure or some leverage, there's no negotiation," Mr. Coats said.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) said talks were stuck because a conservative group within the Republican Party had pressured House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) to bring basic functions of government to a halt to pressure Democrats to make concessions on health care.
"He's got a faction that will continually pull toward the 'let's burn bridges rather than building bridges,' " Mr. Kaine said on MSNBC. "How do you negotiate when you have this faction that wants to pull away and they're actually sort of reveling in what's going on right now?"
The lack of negotiations between the two parties raises the possibility that the partisan divisions that have brought the government to a standstill could delay an increase in the debt limit, delivering a broader and more troublesome blow to the U.S. and global economies.
The White House and Senate Democrats have refused to negotiate conditions for Congress raising the debt limit, saying Congress had a responsibility to allow the Treasury to pay bills that lawmakers had already incurred.
"This is not a concession to me," Mr. Obama said Tuesday. "It is not some demand that's unreasonable that I'm making. This is what Congress is supposed to do as a routine matter."
However, White House officials signaled that Mr. Obama would negotiate with Republicans on their broader budget concerns and possibly some tweaks to the health-care law if Congress approved a temporary extension of government funding and a debt-limit increase to give officials time for talks. Details of how such an agreement would work were unclear.
One official said the White House would like, in particular, to address broad budget cuts known as the sequester but also said there are some tax issues on which Mr. Obama and Republicans could reach a compromise.
—Kristina Peterson and Carol E. Lee contributed to this article.
