WASHINGTON—The House of Representatives, voting along sharply drawn party lines, passed a measure Friday to keep the government funded through mid-December but eliminate funding for the new federal health law, setting the stage for a series of high-stakes negotiations with the Senate over debt and spending.
By 230-189, the Republican-led House passed a plan that would temporarily avoid a partial government shutdown when the current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.
Senate Democrats are planning to strip out provisions that would eliminate funding for the health law. Members of both parties say that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has enough votes to do so, although the process may entail overcoming time-consuming procedural hurdles laid out by conservative senators that could take up all of next week.
"I'm much more confident there won't be a shutdown,'' said Rep. Pete King (R., N.Y.). But he predicted that the debate could be drawn out nearly to the Oct. 1 deadline, because the House is not likely to quickly pass a funding extension stripped of the health-law provisions, if that is what the Senate sends to it next week. "There could be some more back and forth."
The vote came after House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) met behind closed doors with House GOP lawmakers to discuss the strategy for the next fight, over raising the U.S. borrowing limit.
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has told Congress that he expects to hit the debt limit in mid-October, and that the government would then run out of ways to keep paying all its bills. Republicans want to set conditions on any increase in the borrowing limit. The White House has said it is not willing to negotiate on the debt limit, saying that raising it is the responsibility of Congress.
"The key thing is we are going to negotiate over the debt limit. The president isn't going to be able to say, 'I'm just simply not going to talk with anybody,' " Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.) told reporters after the meeting.
House Republican leaders had hoped to postpone the fight over health-care funding until later this fall rather than have the impasse risk a government shutdown. But they reversed course and embraced the bill under pressure from their conservative wing.
"Let's defund this law now and protect the American people from the economic calamity that we know Obamacare will create,'' said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.), who had authored the earlier, less confrontational strategy that would have sent to the Senate a funding bill they were more likely to accept.
Write to Siobhan Hughes at siobhan.hughes@dowjones.com and Janet Hook at janet.hook@wsj.com
