document: No Agreement on Plan to Avert Shutdown WASHINGTON -- Members of Congress remained at loggerheads Friday over a plan to avert a government shutdown , with House Republicans digging in behind a bill that would make it the law of the land to cut $ 61 billion from current spending , despite the fact that the Senate has already rejected that idea . Democrats in the Senate , which ended its workweek Thursday , remained resistant to both the deeper cuts demanded by House members as well as the scores of amendments seeking to make policy changes by reining in environmental regulations , financing for family planning groups and plans to carry out the health care overhaul . Though both parties oppose passing any more short-term spending plans , the threat of a government shutdown continued to loom , something President Obama , speaking at a shipping facility in Landover , Md. , implored lawmakers to avoid . `` It would be the height of irresponsibility to halt our economic momentum because of the same old Washington politics , '' he said . `` The American people do n't want us to go to our respective corners and have the same battles we 've been having for decades . '' Speaker John A. Boehner reiterated that Republicans also wanted to avoid a politically and financially costly shutdown . `` If you shut the government down , it 'll end up costing more than you 'll save because you interrupt contracts , '' he said at a news conference Friday . `` There are a lot of problems with the idea of shutting the government down . It is not the goal . '' Staff members of the Appropriations Committees in both the House and the Senate were expected to work through the weekend to figure out how to spread roughly $ 33 billion in cuts across government agencies . Lawmakers on both sides of the Rotunda and from both parties have informally agreed on that number as a target for reducing spending for the rest of this fiscal year , which ends Sept. 30 . Yet in the House it remains unclear whether the more conservative members , especially the 87 Republican freshmen , would accept that figure . In the Senate , which Democrats control , it is uncertain if lawmakers would agree to deeper spending cuts , as well as rollbacks of some environmental regulations and other amendments . `` We announced the other night in our meeting with the vice president that the White House nor Senate leaders are going to accept any E.P.A. riders , '' Senator Harry Reid , the majority leader , said in a conference call with reporters Friday . With the weekend on the horizon , the House spent Friday afternoon serving up partisan warfare , with a side order of mockery . Republicans narrowly passed a bill that called for their 2011 spending bill -- one that already failed in the Senate -- to become law should the Senate fail to approve its own spending measure by April 6 . The vote was 221 to 202 , with no Democrats in support and 15 Republicans against it . At one point , Representative Anthony Weiner , Democrat of New York , read aloud on the House floor from `` House Mouse , Senate Mouse , '' a children 's book sold in the Congressional gift shops . The story explains how a bill becomes a law -- a process that requires both Senate and House `` mice '' to back a measure , `` ` And if enough do , if enough do , this president signs it if he likes to , ' '' read Mr. Weiner , before accurately noting that the `` Senate mice '' had yet to pass the spending bill approved by the House . Because the measure to bypass the Senate would itself require Senate approval , a highly unlikely outcome , Friday 's vote was largely meaningless . But it did allow Republicans to make the point that the Senate has yet to pass its own spending bill .
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