The U.S. is the only big country with a debt ceiling. The Post's Karen Tumulty explains why. (The Washington Post) 
 
 The U.S. is the only big country with a debt ceiling. The Post's Karen Tumulty explains why. (The Washington Post) 
 
 Washington stumbled toward a shutdown as the Republican Party’s rebellious right wing on Thursday blocked a strategy by House Speaker John A. Boehner for navigating a series of deadlines to keep the government funded and avoid a first-ever default. 
 
 Boehner (R-Ohio) and his leadership team revealed the first step of that plan to rank-and-file lawmakers early Thursday, urging conservatives to shift their ­assault on President Obama’s health-care law to the coming fight over the federal debt limit. 
 
 That would allow lawmakers in the meantime to try to reach an agreement on a plan to fund federal agencies into the new fiscal year, which begins Tuesday, and avoid a shutdown. 
 
 But about two dozen hard-liners rejected that approach, saying they will not talk about the debt limit until the battle over government funding is resolved. 
 
 “Quite frankly, I think that’s primarily where we need to be putting our attention,” said Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.), who has led the drive in the House to use the threat of a shutdown to defund the health-insurance initiative, Obama’s signature legislative achievement. 
 
 View Graphic Countdown to the (possible) shutdown 
 
 Late Thursday afternoon, Boehner convened an emergency meeting of his leadership team to try to hash things out. They emerged with no answers, and no clear path forward for any piece of legislation, either to keep the lights on in Washington or to make sure the Treasury Department can continue to pay the nation’s bills by raising the borrowing limit. 
 
 “We’re getting a lot of feedback, so there hasn’t been a decision that’s been made yet,” said Rep. Peter Roskam (Ill.), a top vote counter for the House GOP. “Our members are . . . very reasonable, they’re thoughtful, and they want to move forward. But they want to move forward on something that’s significant.” 
 
 As Republicans struggled in the House, GOP hard-liners also were blocking progress in the Senate, where most members of both parties were ready to vote late Thursday on a plan to keep the government operating through Nov. 15. 
 
 But Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) objected. Although both men voted earlier this week to advance the measure, they argued Thursday that Republicans should now unite to kill it. 
 
 That prompted an angry Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) to appear in the Senate chamber for a remarkable debate in which he accused Cruz of blocking the late-night vote and delaying it until Friday so he could “turn this into a show” for his supporters from the tea party movement and conservative political organizations, such as Heritage Action for America. 
 
 “I’m understanding the reason we’re waiting is that y’all have sent out releases and e-mails and you want everybody to be able to watch,” Corker said. “And that is taking priority over getting legislation back to the House so they can take action before the country’s government shuts down.” 
 
 Cruz declined to address that allegation, and he accused Corker of assisting Democrats in their effort to strip the House-passed bill of provisions to defund the health-care law. 
 
 1 of 50 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × House GOP explores strategy to avoid shutdown View Photos With federal agencies set to close their doors next week, House Republicans have begun exploring a potential detour on the path to a shutdown: shifting the fight over President Obama’s health-care law to a separate bill that would raise the nation’s debt limit. That would set the stage for a Oct. 17 deadline. Caption Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are scrambling before the Oct. 1 deadline. If a spending plan isn’t passed, many federal agencies will close their doors. Sept. 29, 2013 Cathryn Carroll of the District yells at Republican House members outside the Capitol as they called on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to summon the Senate back to vote on their budget bill. The United States is bracing for a partial government shutdown after the White House and congressional Democrats declared that they would reject a bill approved by the Republican-led House to delay implementing President Obama's signature health-care law. Cliff Owen/AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 “It would be fantastic if Senate Republicans could show the same unity” as House Republicans did in passing the measure last week, Cruz said. 
 
 The Senate is now expected to approve a stripped-down government-funding bill Friday and send it back to the House, where its fate is unclear. GOP leaders insisted Thursday that the House would not approve a simple funding bill without conservative sweeteners. “I do not see that happening,” Boehner said. 
 
 Rep. Patrick J. Tiberi (R-Ohio), a close Boehner ally, predicted that the speaker would amend the government-funding bill to add a one-year delay of the individual mandate, which requires all Americans to have health-insurance next year. 
 
 Another Boehner ally, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), predicted that Boehner would instead seek to add a measure that would eliminate subsidies for members of Congress to buy health insurance — although some Republicans complained at the morning meeting that such a move would create an economic hardship for their families, GOP aides said. 
 
 Meanwhile, Senate Democrats — appearing at a news conference with a countdown clock ticking away the hours, minutes and seconds to a shutdown — said they would not approve a funding measure that required any concessions related to the health-care law. 
 
 “We’ll have to see what they decide, because right now they don’t know,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said of House leaders. “They’re in this ditch, and they want to get out of it, but they keep digging deeper and deeper and deeper. And this ditch is — they can hardly see out of the top of it now. I don’t know what they’re going to do.” 
 
 It was a troubling end to a day that began for Boehner full of hope and bravado. His leadership team had agreed on a new strategy for keeping the government operating — the third this month — and had drafted a massive proposal to suspend enforcement of the debt limit through Dec. 5, 2014. 
 
 The debt-limit bill is packed with conservative goodies, including almost every measure the House has approved since Boehner became speaker in 2011. Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) thought the package had a good chance of attracting the support of 217 Republicans. If it did, they hoped to approve it and send it to the Democratic-controlled Senate this weekend. 
 
 “Now, the president says, ‘I’m not going to negotiate [over the debt limit].’ Well, I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t work that way,” Boehner told reporters after a morning meeting where he presented the proposal to GOP lawmakers. 
 
 Senior advisers explained that passing the debt-limit bill was key to keeping the government open: Once lawmakers had voted for the debt-limit bill, with its one-year delay of the health-care law, they might be more willing to support a measure to fund federal agencies without provisions to defund the health-care law. 
 
 But within hours, a rebellion was brewing. The most conservative bloc of Republicans announced that they would oppose the debt-limit bill until they saw how the fight over the government-funding bill played out. 
 
 And there were other danger signs, according to senior aides to Republicans who ordinarily support the speaker and Cantor. Some mainstream conservatives complained that the debt-limit proposal falls woefully short of Boehner’s pledge to cut spending in an amount equal to the size of the increase in the debt limit — more than $1 trillion, in this case. 
 
 As lawmakers streamed into the House chamber for a series of votes mid-afternoon, members of Boehner’s leadership team began trying to assess the level of support. Afterward, the speaker summoned Cantor, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other senior lawmakers to his office just off the Capitol rotunda. 
 
 The meeting lasted less than an hour. Afterward, the formal release of the debt-limit bill was delayed. McCarthy blew past reporters without commenting on the chamber’s schedule. And rank-and-file lawmakers were left guessing what would come next. 
 
 The day ended with an ominous message from Cantor’s office that lawmakers would be in session Friday, Saturday and Sunday. There was no mention of what, exactly, they would do. 
 
 “This is a change,” the message said, “from the previously announced schedule.” 
 
 Ed O’Keefe, Rosalind S. Helderman and Jackie Kucinich contributed to this report. ||||| “No Congress before this one has ever, ever, in history been irresponsible enough to threaten default, to threaten an economic shutdown, to suggest America not pay its bills, just to try to blackmail a president into giving them some concessions on issues that have nothing to do with a budget,” Mr. Obama said before a friendly audience in suburban Washington. 
 
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 The bitter back and forth in the absence of any high-level discussions between Republicans and Democrats was seen as increasing the possibility of a shutdown or default. It was a marked contrast from past showdowns when talks were taking place behind the scenes even as the parties traded public partisan shots. 
 
 The Senate faces a critical vote on Friday to cut off debate on legislation to keep the government open. If Democrats muster 60 votes, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, will move to strip out House language that guts the health care law and pass a stopgap spending bill that finances the government through Nov. 15, without Republican policy prescriptions. 
 
 At that point, no one is sure how the House will react. 
 
 “There is no secret room where everyone is sitting down and hashing this out,” said Senator Patty Murray, the Washington Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee. 
 
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 Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, encouraged Democrats to come to the table. 
 
 “We call on the president to sit down with us, Harry Reid to sit down with us, and let’s resolve this problem,” he said. 
 
 But in their efforts to unify restive Republicans, House leaders were only widening the partisan divisions. Behind closed doors on Thursday, they laid out their demands for a debt ceiling increase that include the health law delay, fast-track authority to overhaul the tax code, construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, offshore oil and gas production and more permitting of energy exploration on federal lands. 
 
 The legislation would also roll back regulations on coal ash, block new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on greenhouse gas production, eliminate a $23 billion fund to ensure the orderly dissolution of failed major banks, eliminate mandatory contributions to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, limit medical malpractice lawsuits and increase means testing for Medicare, among other provisions. 
 
 Even with that legislative Christmas tree, many Republican backbenchers balked. After introducing the measure to his divided troops, a sheepish speaker of the House faced the press with a grimace. “Oh, this ought to be a blast,” Mr. Boehner sighed as he opened a news conference for questions. 
 
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 Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 2 Democrat, derided the proposal. “The House is attaching the Republican Party platform to the debt ceiling,” he said. “In a week full of absurdities, this one takes the cake.” 
 
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 Republican divisions in the Senate burst into full public view on Thursday. Incensed that hard-liners in his party were slowing final votes on legislation to keep the government open, Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, went to the Senate floor to accuse two fellow Republican senators, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, of grandstanding for the benefit of their conservative-activist followers. 
 
 “Y’all have sent out releases and e-mails, and you want everybody to be able to watch,” he charged. 
 
 Economists of all political persuasions have warned that a failure to raise the debt ceiling by the Treasury’s deadline of Oct. 17 could be catastrophic. The world economy’s faith in the safety of Treasury debt would be shaken for years. Interest rates could shoot up, and stock prices worldwide would most likely plummet. 
 
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 “Defaulting on any obligation of the U.S. government would be a dangerous gamble,” Doug Elmendorf, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, told the House Budget Committee on Thursday. “In a very uncertain world, the one thing everyone has been able to count on is that the U.S. government will pay its bills on time.” 
 
 But many House Republicans put little stock in such pronouncements. 
 
 “Economists, what have they been doing? They make all sorts of predictions,” said Representative John Fleming, Republican of Louisiana. “Many times they’re wrong, so I don’t think we should run government based on economists’ predictions.” 
 
 Those who do believe in the dangers said that they provide precisely the leverage they need to win passage of their priorities. 
 
 “People have to recognize there’s never any compromise until the stakes are high,” said Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California. “In our society, that’s the nature of democratic government.” 
 
 With the twin clocks ticking, Democratic leaders seem paralyzed by rage, claiming Republicans are relying on Democrats to be “the responsible adult in the room” and cave to their hostage-taking. 
 
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 “They have a responsibility to the country. They have a responsibility to their constituents and their children,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House’s No. 2 Democrat. “They are damaging the country, and the public ought to make them pay a price.” 
 
 Democrats — and some Republicans — worried that the shift to the debt-ceiling fight is leaving the government heading to a shutdown on Tuesday with no resolution in sight. 
 
 “I’d like to see us keep that focus there,” said Representative Tom Graves, Republican of Georgia, who led the fight to link further government funding to gutting the Affordable Care Act. “We’ve got a responsibility to finish this up and let it play out.” 
 
 Ms. Murray said the shift in focus from a short-term stopgap spending bill that keeps the government open to the debt ceiling is coming because “Republicans realize fighting a small battle over a small bill is a waste of time.” 
 
 She called the House debt ceiling “Christmas list” unserious. 
 
 “This is not the time to throw in your 50 favorite flavors,” she said. “You can’t just throw everything against the wall and see what happens.” ||||| If Congress wants to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1, it will likely have to clear a one-week stop-gap funding bill to help the two sides come to some sort of agreement. 
 
 But even with all this, there’s no sense that the political dynamics on Capitol Hill will change. Republicans will likely find themselves in the same place: facing a Democratic president and Senate, which doesn’t want to negotiate on the debt limit or government funding. 
 
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 While the Republican rank-and-file complains of poor strategy from the top, GOP leadership sees their members shifting their goals on a constant basis. 
 
 However, it is also clear that Boehner suffers from a “trust gap” among a certain group of his members, one that is not going to go away while he wields his powerful gavel. If Boehner is for it, this faction has to be against it. 
 
 At a meeting of the Republican Study Committee Thursday, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) reminded members that they were the ones who wanted language defunding or delaying Obamacare in the debt-ceiling package, so they should support it. Many were unmoved. 
 
 Boehner and other Republicans thought that fighting for budgetary changes — chiefly changes to Obamacare — as part of the government funding bill was fruitless. He tried to refocus lawmakers’ energy on the debt ceiling bill, seeing it as more fertile ground for a fight. Leadership crafted a package of conservative favorites alongside the one-year debt-limit hike, including a one-year delay of Obamacare, jumpstarting the Keystone XL pipeline and instructions for tax reform. The idea was to put something in the package that everyone liked, and most of these measures had already been approved by the House, so Boehner and his top lieutenants were confident they could line up the votes for the measure quickly. Thursday proved them wrong, although top Republicans believe they will eventually be able to pass it. 
 
 But Republicans instead ended up holding back their support on lifting the debt limit, curious what a final government-funding bill would look like. 
 
 Boehner preferred a vote on the debt ceiling first, as a way to ease the passage of the government-funding bill. Cantor, however, wanted a vote on government funding first, and then the debt ceiling. 
 
 Republicans, once again, faced restive ranks when it came to lifting the nation’s borrowing limit. Republican insiders say they could have reached the 217-vote level to pass the debt-ceiling bill, but said they were not there yet. There were definitely skeptics about the GOP leadership’s debt ceiling package. Some Republicans thought it didn’t deal seriously enough with the debt — its centerpiece policies were a one-year delay of Obamacare and the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. ||||| Enlarge Image Close REUTERS U.S. House Speaker John Boehner speaks to the press after a House Republican meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday. 
 
 Congress's rocky path to avoiding a government shutdown became even rougher Thursday, as Speaker John Boehner said the House wouldn't accept the spending plan likely to emerge from the Senate. 
 
 The Ohio Republican's announcement foreshadows a set of last-minute legislative volleys between the House and Senate to fund federal agencies ahead of a deadline Monday, the final day of the fiscal year. 
 
 House Speaker John Boehner says the American people don't want Obamacare, and that the Senate needs to include Republican provisions in any bill that would keep the government from shutting down when the new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1 Photo: AP 
 
 A government shutdown is looking inevitable as House Majority Leader John Boehner says the House wouldn't accept the spending plan likely to emerge from the Senate. (Photo: Getty Images) 
 
 The Senate is expected to pass a bill Friday that would fund the government for the first 1½ months of the new fiscal year. But Senate Democrats plan to restore money for the Affordable Care Act that House Republicans had stripped out, leaving the two chambers in conflict. 
 
 While the House and Senate struggled for agreement on a government-funding plan, Mr. Boehner was wrestling with the more daunting task of persuading members of his own party to support an increase in the federal debt ceiling. 
 
 Some of the most conservative House members were wary of the Republican leadership's plan to pass a one-year extension of government borrowing authority, even though it would be linked to a yearlong delay of the health law and other prized GOP policy goals. They expressed concern that the bill wouldn't cut spending enough and questioned the strategy of moving forward in the midst of a separate budget fight. 
 
 President Barack Obama repeated Thursday that he won't negotiate on the debt ceiling and won't sign any bill that defunds or delays the health-care law. He lashed out at Republicans for what he said were moves endangering the full faith and credit of the country. "You don't mess with that," he said in a speech in Largo, Md. 
 
 The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that if the debt ceiling isn't raised, the government will be unable to pay all its obligations sometime in late October. 
 
 Investors appear to be eyeing the possibility that the issue won't be resolved, judging by the sixfold increase in the past week—to its highest level since 2011—of the annual cost of derivatives some investors use to hedge against the risk the U.S. will default on its debt. 
 
 Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.), said House GOP leaders were still working to line up support for their debt-ceiling plan. "We've got an awful lot of support, but clearly at this point we don't have a final product that's attracting the number that we need," said Mr. Cole. 
 
 The fractiousness, jockeying and brinkmanship that spread across the Capitol rattled lawmakers and upended predictions about when and how the House and Senate would avoid two impending fiscal calamities. 
 
 Tensions were high on the Senate floor as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) exploded in anger when he was blocked from holding the vote Thursday by an objection from Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), a leading opponent of the health-care law. 
 
 The Republicans' delaying tactics were "as obvious to me as it is to a kindergarten student," Mr. Reid said. 
 
 Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), accused Mr. Lee and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) of grandstanding in refusing to allow quicker action on the bill. 
 
 "The reason that we're putting this off is because they would like for people around the country that they have notified to be able to watch,'' said Mr. Corker, in an unusually personal public squabble with a fellow Republican. 
 
 Mr. Lee said the debate was too important to cut short. "The American people are paying attention to this," he said. 
 
 House lawmakers are prepared to be in session this weekend to take up the bill once it returns from the Senate. Talk that they might accept the Senate bill, which is sure to include money for the health law, and send it to President Obama for his signature dissipated on Thursday when Mr. Boehner said flatly, "I do not see that happening." 
 
 Even so, Mr. Boehner said he didn't expect a government shutdown. Many GOP officials are anxious to avoid one, because they fear their party would bear the blame. Republicans were widely seen as responsible for the shutdowns in 1995-1996 that arose from budget fights between Congress and then-President Bill Clinton. 
 
 Rep. Mo Brooks (R., Ala.) accused Democrats of gunning for a shutdown for political gain. "They crave a government shutdown, because they believe it would give them a campaign advantage in 2014," he said. 
 
 House Republicans are considering a range of options for amending the Senate bill to make it more palatable to conservatives, which would force the Senate to consider the bill again before the Monday midnight deadline. 
 
 Adding a one-year delay in the health-care law's individual mandate is an option that House GOP lawmakers are considering, as is a repeal of the law's tax on medical devices, senior Republican aides said. 
 
 House Republican leaders have been telling conservatives that efforts to limit the reach of the health-care law would be a central element of the battle over raising the debt limit. 
 
 The draft debt-limit bill being circulated included a range of GOP policy proposals. In addition to delaying the health-care law, it included instructions for overhauling the tax code, blocking environmental regulations and clearing the way for building the Keystone XL pipeline. 
 
 National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R., Ore.) said the policies are intended to stimulate the economy, which in turn would reduce the deficit. He said they also were designed to broaden the GOP message beyond its traditional antispending, small-government focus. 
 
 "It's not just about cutting spending; it's not just about cutting government," he said. "We have to grow the economy. Our message hasn't resonated as positively as we would want." 
 
 Democrats derided the legislation as a political gesture. "The House is attaching the Republican Party platform to the debt ceiling," said Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.). 
 
 Even with its broad reach, the draft bill didn't include any major deficit-reduction initiatives, such as structural reforms to Medicare and Medicaid. 
 
 Conservative critics said it represented a retreat from Mr. Boehner's past promises to support increases in the debt limit only if they are matched by spending cuts of equal value, with the goal of balancing the budget in 10 years. 
 
 "I don't know if this gets us down that road," said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R., S.C.). "Are we still dollar-for-dollar in terms of reduction of the deficit?" 
 
 —Siobhan Hughes 
 
 contributed to this article. 
 
 Write to Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@dowjones.com and Janet Hook at janet.hook@wsj.com 
 
 A version of this article appeared September 27, 2013, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Road Gets Rougher for AvoidingShutdown as GOP Stands Firm.
– Word yesterday was that Republicans might attach the ObamaCare battle to the debt-ceiling debate, averting a government shutdown; today, that's looking less likely. Asked whether the House would accept a bill to fund the government after the Senate removes anti-ObamaCare measures, as it is expected to do, John Boehner replied. "I do not see that happening," the Wall Street Journal reports. With Monday marking the end of the fiscal year, the clock is ticking on the bill; despite this, Boehner still says he's not foreseeing a shutdown. But GOP Sen. Mike Lee's objection yesterday prevented a vote in the Senate, and even some of his Republican colleagues are getting fed up. "The reason that we're putting this off is because they would like for people around the country that they have notified to be able to watch," says Sen. Bob Corker. Inside the battle: It was some two dozen GOP "hard-liners" who refused to accept the likely Senate version of the bill, the Washington Post reports, with the paper suggesting that we're "stumbl(ing) toward a shutdown." Those lawmakers don't want to address the debt limit until after the dust settles on government funding. Indeed, party divisions are taking a toll on Republicans, Politico suggests. Leaders see their fellow Republicans as flighty, while lower-ranking lawmakers see ineffective leadership. And some just don't have much faith in Boehner, tending to oppose whatever he puts forward. Here's Obama on the issue, per the New York Times: "No Congress before this one has ever, ever, in history been irresponsible enough to threaten default, to threaten an economic shutdown, to suggest America not pay its bills, just to try to blackmail a president into giving them some concessions on issues that have nothing to do with a budget."