The US Senate advanced a short-term spending measure on Wednesday in a marathon legislative bid to keep the government from running out of money next week.
The upper chamber voted unanimously on a procedural vote to move forward with the legislation to fund the Government in the 2014 fiscal year from October 1 to December 15. Lawmakers will now hold up to 30 hours of debate on the measure. A Senate vote on final passage of the measure is to come later in the week.
If the Senate and lower House of Representatives cannot come to agreement on a budget by Tuesday, the Government would run out of money to operate, forcing a damaging shutdown of most of its operations within weeks.
After the vote, Senate majority leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, said it was time for lawmakers to stop wasting time and get past what he said had become a “big slow, slow walk” in passing a budget.
“Closing the government will hurt our gross domestic product by tens of billions of dollars, just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “We have wasted enough time of the American people in the last few months. Let’s start moving forward.” Last week, the Republican-controlled House passed a short-term budget measure that would defund President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. But the Democratic-controlled Senate is expected to pass a modified version that will keep funding for the controversial health care law that conservative Republicans are determined to shut down.
The two competing versions of the legislation would have to be reconciled with only days before the deadline.
Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, spent more than 21 hours ahead of the vote in a marathon overnight speech against Obama’s health law and defending efforts to defund it. He vowed “to speak until I am no longer able to stand.” The White House said it was happy to negotiate budget priorities, but not to renegotiate the health care law that passed more than three years ago.
“We cannot have the American economy and the global economy and the American middle class held hostage to an insistence by a faction of Congress, especially in one house, that it achieve its political objectives that it had not been able to achieve otherwise,” spokesman Jay Carney said.
“It’s just incredibly irresponsible.” Many of the health care law’s major provisions are due to go into effect Tuesday.
Senator Dan Coats, a Republican, said he didn’t agree that it was a waste of time to talk about an issue that he said was on the mind of every American. He said the effort he and other Republicans had launched was aimed at correcting the inequities in the health care legislation.
To avert a government shutdown Congress has had to pass a series of short-term measures because it has not yet passed a year-long budget for several years. The threat of shutdown loomed several times in recent years before Congress came to last-minute agreements.
Republicans will also face a showdown in coming weeks with Obama and his Democrats over the raising of the US debt ceiling by mid-October, with Republicans also hoping to tie the deal to “Obamacare” spending cuts before agreeing to up the limit.
The Treasury Department warned Wednesday that the government would run out of money to pay its debts on October 17 if Congress does not raise the debt limit.
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warned Congress not to repeat a near failure to raise the limit from 2011.
“If Congress were to repeat that brinkmanship in 2013, it could inflict even greater harm on the economy,” he said in a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner. “And if the government should ultimately become unable to pay all of its bills, the results could be catastrophic.” Previous standoffs over both the budget and the debt ceiling have wreaked havoc on markets and introduced added uncertainty into the US economy. After the 2011 standoff, several rating agencies reduced the US credit standing.