Creep toward government shutdown becoming all too familiar

By Karoun Demirjian

Friday, Sept. 23, 2011 | 12:31 a.m.

On Thursday night in Florida, nine Republican presidential hopefuls went before television cameras — a slightly bigger crew since New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson secured enough votes for a spot on stage — to talk about their competing visions for America’s future.

In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, the country’s current government was hurtling headfirst into another eleventh-hour disaster.

It’s federal budget time again, and as the calendar creeps toward the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, Congress has resumed its traditional game of bicameral chicken: this time over funding emergency disaster relief.

The sensation of careening toward the brink of government shutdown has become as familiar as the dynamics of these Republican presidential debates.

GOP front runners Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have well learned where each others’ weak flanks are and are becoming more inventive about how they tear into each others’ opinions on health care and Social Security.

In Washington, D.C., Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner are also well versed on the opposing party’s problem areas, but the immediate stakes of exploiting them are much higher.

Nonetheless, here we are on the brink of a shutdown again.

On the Senate side, Democrats want to include a $6.9 billion grant to help bolster the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which has been stretched thin this summer responding to a spate of disasters, from wildfires in Texas to flooding on the Eastern Seaboard.

In the House, Republicans only want to expend $3.7 billion — enough for about six weeks — and to offset it by cancelling what remains of the government’s renewable energy loan guarantee program.

If it sounds familiar, it’s because the Senate already took that vote: both of Nevada’s senators supported the $6.9 billion figure.

But it wasn’t part of the budget.

It took the House two tries before it was actually able to approve its short-term continuing budget resolution, with $3.7 billion for FEMA. On Wednesday afternoon, Democrats and several conservative Republicans refused to support the measure and it died, 195-230. Thursday night crept into the wee hours of Friday morning before House leaders were able to cull enough support for a second version of their bill, which passed 219-203.

And then, it appeared, the House was done.

“This common-sense measure cuts spending for the second year in a row and protects our struggling economy from the uncertainty of a government shutdown,” Boehner said in a statement after the vote. “The Democratic-led Senate should pass it without delay.

But hours before Republican leaders whipped that vote, Reid had already warned that the Senate wouldn’t support it.

“The bill the House will vote on tonight is not an honest effort at compromise,” he said in a statement in which he criticized Boehner for once again shifting to accommodate a Tea Party position instead of one that could bring about a compromise with Democrats. “It will be rejected by the Senate.”

So here we are again: Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, unemployment insurance, museum closings — everything is at risk again if lawmakers don’t resolve the standoff by midnight on Sept. 30.

If you could hear the fatigue in that last sentence, it was intentional. Leaders in both parties are publicly tiring of the now deeply rooted pattern in which they are both mired and complicit, and they are dismissing the threat of a shutdown as they do their part to stir up the fear of it.

But they’re talking past each other.

“House Republicans should stop playing political games and pass the Senate’s bipartisan bill without delay,” Reid said Thursday in an almost parallel appeal — parties switched, of course — to Boehner’s comments earlier.

It’s going to be a long weekend.