Guide to upcoming budget and debt ceiling fights

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed a stopgap bill Friday, which would keep funding the government through Dec. 15 but also strips money from the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Barack Obama's signature domestic achievement. The bill, called a continuing resolution (CR), now goes to the Democratic-controlled Senate for consideration -- the first volley in a war among Democratic and Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and the White House over spending, debt and the role of government that is bound to get even nastier in the coming weeks.

Will there be a government shutdown? 

Unless the Senate and the House can agree to a continuing resolution by Sept. 30, the government will shut down -- as it did a handful of times in the mid-1990s -- until they reach a deal. The CR currently on the table, in addition to defunding health care reform, locks in the deep spending cuts put in place earlier this year by the sequester, which kicked in when Congress failed to come to a grand bargain on the budget.  

The bill is considered dead on arrival. The White House has already said it would veto any measure that touches the Affordable Care Act, in the unlikely event that it makes it to Obama's desk, but it will more likely meet its doom next week in the Senate. Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid is expected to strip the bill of its health care law provision, bring it up for a vote and then toss it back to the House.

Then it's anyone's guess what the House GOP conference will do. GOP leadership would likely try to convince the base that a shutdown makes the party look bad, to accept the bill as is, and to keep fighting the health care law at a later date. Or it might decide to shut down the government on principle.

Meanwhile, House conservatives have been heckling their Senate counterparts to put up a bigger fight to defund the health care law in the Senate. Under pressure from them, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, responded by suggesting that he may stage a filibuster next week to keep a watered-down version from passing the Senate.

Why is there infighting among Republicans?

Many conservatives see this as their last chance to stop the health care law before one of the central provisions of the ACA -- the online exchanges that will allow some consumers to apply for subsidies to pay for their insurance -- goes into effect, at which point the ACA will be too ingrained to undo. 

But Republicans also know that shutting down the government is typically unpopular with the American people. The party paid the price after similar budget wrangling between a Republican-controlled House and Democratic President Bill Clinton forced a shutdown in the late 1990s.

"Republicans ought to understand if we shut down the government, Congress always gets blamed -- rightly or wrongly -- Congress gets blamed," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on CNN. "We've seen the movie before. It's just some of them weren't around at the time; I was."

The public is also weary of the constant brinksmanship that has characterized governance in the United States since 2010, when conservatives were ushered into Congress by the Tea Party wave with a singular determination to cut government spending and repeal the health care law.  

Therefore, one faction of the GOP, including many Senate Republicans, is urging caution before House Republicans seemingly push the country into a government shutdown. Another contingent says any Republican who votes for a continuing resolution that includes funds for the ACA is in effect supporting the law.  

What does the debt ceiling have to do with all of this?

If Congress manages to reach a deal that keeps the government open and leaves health care reform funds intact, it's possible that House Republicans will refuse to raise the debt ceiling until their demands are met. Raising the debt ceiling -- that is, the limit on how much money the U.S. government can borrow -- was once an uncontroversial function that Congress has carried out dozens of times since the 1960s. But in the last few years, it's become a recurring nightmare in Washington, with Republicans using it as a bargaining tool to extract compromises from the president on spending and revenue policies. The Treasury Department said this month that not raising the debt ceiling would cause the United States to default on its loans by the end of October, which would assuredly wreak economic havoc on an already tepid global recovery.