They also complained that the proposal funded the Department of veterans Affairs at a lower level of funding than what the House had green-lighted over the summer.

Republicans were forced to seek a two-thirds majority for all three measures because they were attempting to pass the bills while the House’s ordinary rules were under suspension.

SAFE: Military servicemen and servicewomen will not see their paychecks interrupted during the shutdown, thanks to the sole bright spot of cooperation in an otherwise politically rancorous Monday. But on Tuesday, House Democrats blocked one-off funding for military veterans who have come home.

Had they operated under the ‘regular order,’ Democrats could have amended any one of them, turning it into what Democrats call a ‘clean CR’ – a continuing resolution funding the entire government without Obamacare-related strings attached.

The Obama administration on Tuesday dismissed the idea of responding to a series of limited measures that would fund individual segments of the federal government.

‘Even that proposal shows the utter lack of seriousness that we’re seeing from Republicans,’ white House Press Secretary jay Carney told reporters in his daily briefing.

‘If they want to open the government, they should open the government, and then we can negotiate about how we fund our budget priorities in the future. A piecemeal approach to funding the government is not a serious approach.’

In a separate statement shortly after 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said Obama and Senate Democrats ‘won’t accept this kind of game-playing, and if these bills were to come to the president’s desk he would veto them.’

‘If House Republicans are legitimately concerned about the impacts of a shutdown – which extend across government from our small businesses to women, children and seniors – they should do their job and pass a clean CR to reopen the government,’ she said.

Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who famously monopolized the U.S. Senate floor for nearly a full day last week in an anti-Obamacare protest, floated the idea of limited funding resolutions Monday on CNN. He was responding to President Obama’s catalogue of complaints about government programs affected by Congress’ inability to reach a grand bargain Monday night.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (C) declined to block a bill Monday that funded military salaries despite a government shutdown, and House Republicans are hoping he will follow suit with other narrow-cast legislation

President Obama cited national park closures on Monday as one major public loss under a government shutdown

‘I think we ought to start passing
continuing resolutions narrowly focused on each of the things the
President listed,’ Cruz told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

Republicans
dodged one potential embarrassment on Monday afternoon, sending the
Senate a bill ensuring that paychecks will continue to flow to military
servicemen and women while the rest of the government is in limbo. After Reid declined to block it, the president signed the measure at 10:00 p.m.

‘The president listed all of these
terrible things that will happen if Harry Reid forces a shutdown,” Cruz
said, complaining that Obama said ‘he plans to close every national
park. Let’s fund the [Department of the] Interior, keeping the parks
open.’

‘One at a time let’s demonstrate the same bipartisan cooperation we saw today with the military.’

President Barack Obama has complained that veterans services and America’s national parks were closed at midnight Monday, but his White House says he will veto bills that would reopen them

The
GOP would have succeeded in neutralizing a powerful Democratic talking point
if the parks system and services for veterans had been taken off the table
as budget negotiations continued.

Cruz and other senators on the political right, including Utah Sen. Mike Lee, had been quietly persuading their House counterparts to send Senate Democrats a steady drip of legislative patches, cornering them repeatedly with initiatives that they don’t dare block.

‘I don’t know about funding D.C. government,’ a second Capitol Hill aide told MailOnline on Tuesday afternoon. ‘But veterans shouldn’t have problems getting help, and the national parks seem to be a political winner right now, so that’s where the energy is flowing.’

Washington, D.C. relies on Congress for authority to spend tax dollars, since it doesn’t have an autonomous state government. Mayor Vincent Gray said Tuesday that he would designate every city employee as ‘essential,’ paving the way for him to use a special rainy-day fund to keep city services open.

But his preference, Gray said, was a congressional bill allowing D.C. to spend its own tax dollars without federal government oversight during the shutdown. That measure was defeated despite support from every Republican.

Continuing resolutions, known as ‘CR’s in Congress, fund the national government at the end of a fiscal year in lieu of a formal budget, and have become increasingly commonplace when two different political parties lead the two houses of Congress.

And ‘there’s no rule that a CR has to fund every bit of the fed[eral] government at the same time,’ Cruz told Blitzer on Monday. ‘We should pick the top, the critical priorities, the areas where if the Democrats force a shutdown, … there will be the most pain. Let’s take them off the table.’

Liberal partisans began tweeting their virtual guffaws at the Texas Republican almost immediately after the House voted the proposal down on Tuesday.

Slate magazine columnist Dave Weigel tweeted that it was ‘the second brilliant Ted Cruz strategy that has gone belly-up b/c [because] he forgot Democrats exist.’

Share or comment on this article

Comments (260)

Share what you think

• 
  
  Newest
• 
  
  Oldest
• 
  
  Best rated
• 
  
  Worst rated

The comments below have not been moderated.

Who is this week’s top commenter?
Find out now