Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kenrucky, center, accompanied by GOP leaders, talk to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington on Thursday after defeating a $54 billion funding bill for transportation, housing and community development grants because it exceeded the punishing spending limits required under automatic budget cuts.WASHINGTON – Leaving piles of unfinished business for the fall, Congress began exiting Washington Thursday for a five-week vacation with its accomplishments few, its efforts at budgeting in tatters and its collective nerves frayed by months of feuding.
The House’s chief accomplishment for the week was a bipartisan Wednesday vote to deal with spiking student loan interest rates, readying that legislation for President Barack Obama’s signature. But that bit of progress came the very day that a Republican strategy of embracing painful automatic budget cuts imploded with the collapse of a major transportation and housing bill.
That measure fell victim, top lawmakers said, to opposition from both conservative and more moderate Republicans and laid bare the flaws in the party’s budget strategy, which promised deeper cuts to domestic programs than the rank and file were willing to deliver in votes on funding bills implementing the pledge.
Before leaving town, the GOP House prepared its 40th attack on Obama’s signature health care law on Friday and slated votes on other legislation aimed at embarrassing the administration and sharpening the party’s political message for encounters back home with constituents.
Also on Friday, GOP leaders looked forward to an easier time with two other votes, one to block the Internal Revenue Service from enforcing “Obamacare’s” penalties on people who don’t buy health insurance and another on the “Stop Government Abuse Act,” which among its provisions would allow people to tape record conversations they have with IRS agents and other federal workers.