US House of Representatives to Resume Budget Battle

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VOA News – The U.S. House of Representatives meets Saturday in another effort to pass a budget to fund the federal government at least until November 15.Legislators face a Monday midnight deadline for action if hundreds of thousands of federal workers are not to be laid off and many government programs halted.President Barack Obama told White House reporters Friday that Republicans in the House should stop what he called “political grandstanding” and approve a temporary government funding measure without tying it to efforts to gut the new health care program known as “Obamacare.”

The speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican John Boehner, accused the president of “grandstanding” himself, saying Obama has refused to even be part of the process.

The comments came hours after the Senate passed a temporary government spending measure that funds the health care law.

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The House has passed its own version of a spending bill which defunds the law, known formally as the Affordable Care Act.

If the two houses of Congress cannot reach an agreement there will be a partial government shutdown starting Tuesday, October 1.

Another deadline also looms – October 17 – when Congress must vote to increase the government’s borrowing authority. If no agreement is reached by the then, the United States could default on its debts for the first time ever.

President Obama said Friday that a failure by Congress to increase the so-called “debt ceiling” would have a “profound destabilizing effect” on the U.S. and world economies.

Some Republican leaders fear a partial shutdown of the federal government would hurt the party’s standing heading into next year’s congressional elections. A government shutdown in the mid-1990s, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, was followed by the re-election of then-president Bill Clinton in 1996.

Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.

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  1. Another deadline also looms – October 17 – when Congress must vote to increase the government's borrowing authority. If no agreement is reached by the then, the United States could default on its debts for the first time ever.

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