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Blame game rife as Dems, GOP try to avert shutdown

01 October 2013 00:41 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Republicans and Democrats blamed each other Monday as they took the federal government to the brink of a shutdown in an intractable budget dispute over President Barack Obama's signature health care law, APA reports quoting Associated Press.

House Republicans excoriated Senate Democrats for taking the weekend off and resisting a House measure that would avert a shutdown, though with conditions: delaying further implementation of the health care law for a year and eliminating a tax on medical devices.

"The Senate decided not to work yesterday," Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said shortly after the House began its session — and just hours before a threatened shutdown at midnight. "Well my goodness, if there's such an emergency, where are they?"

"There's a pretty straightforward solution to this," Obama said at the White House. That's for "everybody to act responsibly and do what's right for the American people."

For the Senate, however, the GOP strings on the spending bill were nonstarters. The Senate returns shortly after 2 p.m. EDT and Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and his Democrats have made it clear that they want a straightforward bill to keep the government open. Reid plans votes to reject House GOP-crafted amendments to delay the 3-year-old health care law and eliminate a tax on medical devices, and he has the numbers to prevail.

"They cannot seem to stop themselves," Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said of Republicans at a Capitol Hill news conference. "So we will stop them."