Congress had more than a month to try to pass a long overdue budget that would have kept the country running until October 17, when they had to vote whether or not to raise the debt ceiling.  Congress needed to pass a spending bill that would pay people who work for the Federal government and facilities that are funded by the government. Even stop gap measurements, which are funds set aside in case the government does shutdown, did not work this time. The House of Representatives controlled by the Republicans, created a spending bill so the government wouldn’t shutdown, but this bill didn’t fund The Affordable Care Act (known as ObamaCare). This was a party line vote; in general, Republicans are not in favor of ObamaCare and Democrats are all for it.  When the budget bill was bought to the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, the bill died. Slowly the budget bill was becoming less and less about the budget and more about ObamaCare. But even if a budget did not passed, the Affordable Care Act still went into effect, defeating the purpose of the Republican’s fight against ObamaCare. The Republicans wanted to meet with the president to negotiate parts of The Affordable Care Act, but President Barack Obama said he would do no such thing. John Boehner, majority leader of the House of Representatives, tried to pass several bills attempting to keep open a few departments like National Parks and Veterans Affairs. The Democrat’s first idea to save the government from a shutdown was to get a few Republicans from the House to side with them to pass a budget. This turned out to be a failure; not enough Republicans wanted to rescue the government. Democrats had to look deep into their playbooks to pull out a discharge bill. A discharge bill is where a bill will go right to the House floor and it will either pass or fail. To pass this bill, the House of Representatives had to have at least 218 votes for it to pass, which is what ultimately ended up happening. Once the Senate passed the spending bill, John Boehner put in place the dicharge bill that passed by a slim majority. This budget bill will only bring us to around January/February, then will we be doing this all over again in the next few months?