COLUMBUS, Ohio – Hundreds of federal government employees in central Ohio are working again today, with the approval of a short-term budget.
The 15-day-old partial shutdown of the federal government ended last night after the House followed the Senate’s lead and approved the measure, which President Barack Obama signed overnight.
Republicans Pat Tiberi of Genoa Township and Steve Stivers of Upper Arlington and Democrat Joyce Beatty of Columbus were among the 285 “yes” votes. So was House Speaker John Boehner, but the rest of the members from Greater Cincinnati voted against the bipartisan proposal. They said it failed to revise the Affordable Care Act or put long-term caps on spending.
“We fought the good fight. We just didn’t win it,” Boehner told Cincinnati radio station WLW-AM earlier in the day when he agreed not to block the measure, which did not contain any proposals to rein in the health care reform law known as Obamacare.
“The government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis easily could have been averted if certain Republican Members of the House had not continuously opposed rational solutions,” Beatty said in a statement issued after the vote, a reference to tea party-influenced efforts to defund or undercut Obamacare.
“A small minority of ideologically extreme members of Congress irresponsibly ignored the well-being of our nation and their constituents to make a political statement. In the process they hurt our national economy and they harmed many Americans,” Ohio AFL-CIO president Tim Burga said, aiming his ire at the tea party as well.
Ohio’s Republican senator, Rob Portman, budget director under President George W. Bush, also voted for the measure but called on Obama to work to avoid the next shutdown.
“We’ve done our part, and now he must do his to negotiate on a path forward to deal with Washington’s underlying problem of overpromising and overspending that brought our nation to this boiling point in the first place,” he said in a statement.
Standard & Poor’s estimated the shutdown cost the nation’s economy $24 billion.
The shutdown affected more than 50,000 federal employees in Ohio, according to one estimate.
That includes Defense Supply Center employees in Whitehall, who will be recalled from their furloughs along with workers at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at the base and the NASA Glenn Research Center and Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Cleveland.