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No Agreement on Plan to Avert Shutdown

Members of Congress remained at loggerheads Friday over a plan to avert a government shutdown, with House Republicans digging in behind a bill that would make it the law of the land to cut $61 billion from current spending, despite the fact that the Senate has already rejected that idea. Democrats in the Senate, which ended its workweek Thursday, remained resistant to both the deeper cuts demanded by House members as well as the scores of amendments seeking to make policy changes by reining in environmental regulations, 魔域私服 financing for family planning groups and plans to carry out the health care overhaul. Though both parties oppose passing any more short-term spending plans, the threat of a government shutdown continued to loom, something President Obama, speaking at a shipping facility in Landover, Md., implored lawmakers to avoid. “It would be the height of irresponsibility to halt our economic momentum because of the same old Washington politics,” he said. “The American people don’t want us to go to our respective corners and have the same battles we’ve been having for decades.” Speaker John A. Boehner reiterated that Republicans also wanted to avoid a politically and financially costly shutdown. “If you shut the government down, it’ll end up costing more than you’ll save because you interrupt contracts,” he said at a news conference Friday. “There are a lot of problems with the idea of shutting the government down. It is not the goal.” Staff members of the Appropriations Committees in both the House and the Senate were expected to work through the weekend to figure out how to spread roughly $33 billion in cuts across government agencies. Lawmakers on both sides of the Rotunda and from both parties have informally agreed on that number as a target for reducing spending for the rest of this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Yet in the House it remains unclear whether the more conservative members, 传奇私服 especially the 87 Republican freshmen, would accept that figure. In the Senate, which Democrats control, it is uncertain if lawmakers would agree to deeper spending cuts, as well as rollbacks of some environmental regulations and other amendments. “We announced the other night in our meeting with the vice president that the White House nor Senate leaders are going to accept any E.P.A. riders,” Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, said in a conference call with reporters Friday. With the weekend on the horizon, the House spent Friday afternoon serving up partisan warfare, with a side order of mockery. Republicans narrowly passed a bill that called for their 2011 spending bill — one that already failed in the Senate — to become law should the Senate fail to approve its own spending measure by April 6. The vote was 221 to 202, with no Democrats in support and 15 Republicans against it. At one point, Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, read aloud on the House floor from “House Mouse, Senate Mouse,” a children’s book sold in the Congressional gift shops. 传世私服 The story explains how a bill becomes a law — a process that requires both Senate and House “mice” to back a measure, “ ‘And if enough do, if enough do, this president signs it if he likes to,’ ” read Mr. Weiner, before accurately noting that the “Senate mice” had yet to pass the spending bill approved by the House. Because the measure to bypass the Senate would itself require Senate approval, a highly unlikely outcome, Friday’s vote was largely meaningless. But it did allow Republicans to make the point that the Senate has yet to pass its own spending bill.