Obama presses for passage of spending bill as deadline looms
As fiscal deadline looms, Obama presses Republicans not to shut government down over political wish list, especially on health care
As the US government careers towards a potentially devastating shutdown, President Barack Obama has urged intransigent lawmakers to end their brinkmanship and pass a spending bill.
With less than 72 hours to go until agencies are forced to close their doors on Tuesday and more than a million US troops to remain on duty without pay, Congress yesterday appeared no closer to resolution of a fiscal crisis.
Republicans driving the agenda in the House of Representatives, which was to hold an emergency session yesterday to consider legislation to keep the government open, appeared to struggle over the way forward.
The president hailed the Senate for clearing a stopgap federal funding measure on Friday that knocked the ball into the House's court, where a diehard conservative faction is bent on thwarting Obama's health-care law.
The Republican-led lower chamber will probably tweak the bill and send it back to the Senate, which could leave insufficient time for the legislation to pass both chambers before a fiscal-year-end deadline of midnight tomorrow Washington time.
"Over the next three days, House Republicans will have to decide whether to join the Senate and keep the government open or shut it down because they can't get their way," Obama said.
Republicans, overwhelmingly opposed to so-called Obamacare, inserted a provision in the House measure that strips funding for the health-care law, but the Democratic-led Senate removed it and sent the bill back. Some Republicans would now like to see the fight over health care shift to the next fiscal battle - over the debt ceiling.