House GOP aims to narrow government shutdown piece-by-piece, funding national parks, veterans programs, D.C. government By David Martosko, U.s. Political Editor House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi enjoyed Tuesday evening's vote, in which nearly all of her fellow Democrats blocked veterans and national parks funding as a response to what she called 'hostage' taking by Republicans Three stopgap measures funding veterans affairs programs, national parks and museums, and the Washington, D.C. city government failed Tuesday night, after House Democrats blocked GOP leaders by denying them enough votes to reach a two-thirds supermajority. The measures were a gambit that Republicans hoped would give them leverage over Democrats in the continuing budget fight. A White House spokeswoman had said hours earlier that President Barack Obama would veto the measures, and Senate Democrats added they they would not consider them. Those moves, plus 'no' votes by most House Democrats, may leave the party with an unenviable public image as the political force that has left 401 national parks closed and military veterans in limbo an Republican insiders had expressed confidence in the plan earlier Tuesday, with one telling MailOnline that 'the president and Senate Dems won't be able to complain about the national parks being closed much longer.' 'By tomorrow we'll have that ball in Harry Reid's court,' said the well-placed House aide, 'and God help him if he blocks it.' But Democrats prevailed in a series of three votes, following Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's warning that Republicans had taken 'hostages' in closing the federal government, and were merely 'releasing one hostage at a time.' Thirty-three of the 197 Democrats joined every Republican to support the veterans funding bill. Thirty-four crossed over to support a measure allowing the district of Columbia to temporarily determine its own spending priorities. And just 22 Democrats voted to support a bill funding 'National Park Service operations, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.' Speaker of the House John Boehner (R) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (L) tried but failed to pass three narrow funding bills Tuesday night that would have kept segments of the U.S. government open GOP Rep. Darrell Issa had made budget autonomy for the District of Columbia a pet cause, crossing the aisle to work with D.C.'s sole congressional delegate, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton 'Democrats are voting to kill clean, no-strings-attached funding for veterans care because Obama told them to,' tweeted Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman after the first vote total was published. 'That's sick.' Our Vets served honorably & courageously,' House Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy added. Dems blocking to open up services for them is shameful. Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, had already dismissed several attempts in the Republican-led House to defund or delay the implementation of the Obamacare health insurance law, as a condition of continuing to pay for the federal government's regular operations. Democrats argued against the veterans funding bill Tuesday on the House floor, saying that Republicans were still denying funding for other programs that U.S. servicemen and women had fought to uphold. They also denied Washington, D.C., whose residents haven't backed a Republican presidential candidate since Abraham Lincoln, permission to determine their own funding priorities. Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, the Californian who chairs the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, called the move 'a deeply cynical maneuver.' 'The budget impasse hurts our country,' Issa said in a statement, 'but this vote underscores how much the Democratic leadership believes the Reid shutdown is a political winner that they're not eager to fix through negotiations or compromise.' A group of veterans walked past barriers at the closed World War II memorial with help from members of Congress on Tuesday. Hundreds arrived for a previously scheduled visit to the memorial Sen. Ted Cruz led the charge to strip Obamacare funding from a resolution that would fund the rest of the federal government, and is now urging House Republicans to send the Senate a steady drip of narrow proposals instead They also complained that the proposal funded the Department of veterans Affairs at a lower level of funding than what the House had green-lighted over the summer. Republicans were forced to seek a two-thirds majority for all three measures because they were attempting to pass the bills while the House's ordinary rules were under suspension. SAFE: Military servicemen and servicewomen will not see their paychecks interrupted during the shutdown, thanks to the sole bright spot of cooperation in an otherwise politically rancorous Monday. But on Tuesday, House Democrats blocked one-off funding for military veterans who have come home. Had they operated under the 'regular order,' Democrats could have amended any one of them, turning it into what Democrats call a 'clean CR' - a continuing resolution funding the entire government without Obamacare-related strings attached. The Obama administration on Tuesday dismissed the idea of responding to a series of limited measures that would fund individual segments of the federal government. 'Even that proposal shows the utter lack of seriousness that we're seeing from Republicans,' white House Press Secretary jay Carney told reporters in his daily briefing. If they want to open the government, they should open the government, and then we can negotiate about how we fund our budget priorities in the future. A piecemeal approach to funding the government is not a serious approach. In a separate statement shortly after 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said Obama and Senate Democrats 'won't accept this kind of game-playing, and if these bills were to come to the president's desk he would veto them.' 'If House Republicans are legitimately concerned about the impacts of a shutdown - which extend across government from our small businesses to women, children and seniors - they should do their job and pass a clean CR to reopen the government,' she said. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who famously monopolized the U.S. Senate floor for nearly a full day last week in an anti-Obamacare protest, floated the idea of limited funding resolutions Monday on CNN. He was responding to President Obama's catalogue of complaints about government programs affected by Congress' inability to reach a grand bargain Monday night. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (C) declined to block a bill Monday that funded military salaries despite a government shutdown, and House Republicans are hoping he will follow suit with other narrow-cast legislation President Obama cited national park closures on Monday as one major public loss under a government shutdown 'I think we ought to start passing continuing resolutions narrowly focused on each of the things the President listed,' Cruz told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Republicans dodged one potential embarrassment on Monday afternoon, sending the Senate a bill ensuring that paychecks will continue to flow to military servicemen and women while the rest of the government is in limbo. After Reid declined to block it, the president signed the measure at 10:00 p.m. 'The president listed all of these terrible things that will happen if Harry Reid forces a shutdown," Cruz said, complaining that Obama said 'he plans to close every national park. Let's fund the [Department of the] Interior, keeping the parks open.' 'One at a time let's demonstrate the same bipartisan cooperation we saw today with the military.' President Barack Obama has complained that veterans services and America's national parks were closed at midnight Monday, but his White House says he will veto bills that would reopen them The GOP would have succeeded in neutralizing a powerful Democratic talking point if the parks system and services for veterans had been taken off the table as budget negotiations continued. Cruz and other senators on the political right, including Utah Sen. Mike Lee, had been quietly persuading their House counterparts to send Senate Democrats a steady drip of legislative patches, cornering them repeatedly with initiatives that they don't dare block. 'I don't know about funding D.C. government,' a second Capitol Hill aide told MailOnline on Tuesday afternoon. 'But veterans shouldn't have problems getting help, and the national parks seem to be a political winner right now, so that's where the energy is flowing.' Washington, D.C. relies on Congress for authority to spend tax dollars, since it doesn't have an autonomous state government. Mayor Vincent Gray said Tuesday that he would designate every city employee as 'essential,' paving the way for him to use a special rainy-day fund to keep city services open. But his preference, Gray said, was a congressional bill allowing D.C. to spend its own tax dollars without federal government oversight during the shutdown. That measure was defeated despite support from every Republican. Continuing resolutions, known as 'CR's in Congress, fund the national government at the end of a fiscal year in lieu of a formal budget, and have become increasingly commonplace when two different political parties lead the two houses of Congress. And 'there's no rule that a CR has to fund every bit of the fed[eral] government at the same time,' Cruz told Blitzer on Monday. We should pick the top, the critical priorities, the areas where if the Democrats force a shutdown, ... there will be the most pain. Let's take them off the table.' Liberal partisans began tweeting their virtual guffaws at the Texas Republican almost immediately after the House voted the proposal down on Tuesday. Slate magazine columnist Dave Weigel tweeted that it was 'the second brilliant Ted Cruz strategy that has gone belly-up b/c [because] he forgot Democrats exist.'