Majority Leader Harry Reid. (Talk Radio News Service/Flickr Creative Commons)

This procedural vote, made on Wednesday, will most likely trigger a series of other votes that decides the fate of Obamacare's funding in the coming fiscal year.

Majority Leader Harry Reid openly plans to strip the House-passed bill of its anti-Obamacare language during the votes scheduled over the next few days.

"Any bill that defunds Obamacare is dead - dead," said Reid to reporters. "They're simply postponing the inevitable choice they must face."

Despite Reid's assurance, he is still facing opposition in the Senate, as evidenced by Ted Cruz's recently ended filibuster.

SEE ALSO: Ted Cruz's All-Night "Filibuster" Ends

Minority Leader McConnell and his colleagues are also urging Republicans not to bend to Obamacare and prevent Sen. Reid from taking the anti-Obamacare language out of the House-passed bill, albeit with tactics not as blunt as Sen. Cruz's.

All of this is happening dangerously close to the fiscal deadline on Oct. 1st - if a functional bill cannot be agreed upon by that date, the federal government may be forced to shut down.

In a letter to Congress, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warns that the U.S. will run out of borrowed money "no later than Oct. 17th," unless Congress raises the debt ceiling.

This is the first time Lew has predicted an exact date on which the U.S. government would hit their debt limit.

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