Trump signs 2-week spending bill
Measure gives lawmakers time to craft longer-term agreement
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Friday signed a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown and keep the federal government running through Dec. 22.
The president signed the two-week spending measure in private at the White House after the House and Senate acted to prevent a government shutdown this weekend. The funding reprieve comes as the White House and congressional leaders are negotiating a longer-term agreement, building off a Thursday meeting involving Trump and congressional leaders.
The White House and lawmakers said the bill will give them more time to negotiate several end-of-the-year agenda items, including the budget, a children’s health program and hurricane aid. Administration and congressional aides continued the talks Friday.
“We hope that we’re going to make some great progress for our country. I think that will happen,” Trump said Thursday in the Oval Office. Added Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer of New York: “Funding the government is extremely important, helping our soldiers is very important and helping average citizens is very important. So we’re here in the spirit of: Let’s get it done.”
The two-week measure funds government agencies from the Defense Department to the IRS. It also makes money available to several states running out of funds for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The popular health care program provides medical care to more than 8 million children.
The White House and lawmakers have been discussing relief from a budget freeze on the Pentagon and domestic agencies, extending the children’s health program and providing more disaster aid to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida.
Negotiators are also seeking ways of addressing protections for illegal aliens who were granted protection under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Republican leaders have said they agree with the need to address immigration, including the approximately 800,000 deferred-action participants.
Trump has sought stronger border security and immigration enforcement as part of the talks, and the White House said Thursday that “negotiations on immigration should be held separately on a different track” to avoid slowing down funding increases for the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, the GOP is trying to put the finishing touches on a tax bill that it wants to pass by Christmas.
As Republicans work to finalize a massive tax cut for businesses, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., warned his colleagues that the GOP is in danger of solidifying its image as the party that only cares about the very wealthy, which he dubbed the country club set.
“Good time to revisit a landmark 1977 speech given by President Ronald Reagan in which he called for a ‘New Republican Party’ that will not be and cannot be one limited to the country club-big business image,” he tweeted Friday morning. “The New Republican Party … is going to have room for the man & the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat.”
Rubio said there were “going to be problems” if the conference committee that is meeting to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate tax plans lowers the big business tax rate even further or scales back the Child Tax Credit, a key priority for Rubio throughout the debate.
Rubio tweeted “If #TaxReform conference weakens #ChildTaxCredit OR reduce corp cut but don’t make CTC refundable for working families, going to be problems.”
Senators will get one more chance to vote on the bill that comes out of the committee.
At the moment, Republicans can only afford to lose one more vote. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., has already said he won’t vote for it because he thinks it adds too much to the country’s already sizable debt.
While Rubio has emerged as a vocal champion for the working poor in the tax debate, he has always ended up voting the party line to advance the bill at every step of the process.
National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, meanwhile, said the White House supports tweaking final tax legislation to appease lawmakers who want to let constituents deduct state income taxes.
His comments marked the first time the White House has publicly weighed in on a potential compromise for state and local tax deductions that emerged this week. But Cohn declined to say whether the White House supports setting the corporate income tax rate above 20 percent to help pay for the revenue cost of that change — which would probably be in the neighborhood of $100 billion over 10 years, based on an independent estimate.
The White House has sent mixed signals on where the corporate tax rate should be set.
After insisting it should be cut to 20 percent from 35 percent, Trump said last weekend that it might be 22 percent.
On Friday, 26 conservative groups — including the National Taxpayers Union and the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund — sent a letter to House and Senate members who are working on the final legislation, urging them to stick with a 20 percent corporate rate.
Lawmakers are trying to meld the differing tax bills that each chamber has passed.
Republican tax writers’ plans for state and local tax deductions have been another source of contention. Current House and Senate bills would preserve an individual deduction for state and local property taxes — capped at $10,000 — but not for income taxes.
“No one really wants tax increases here,” Cohn said Friday during a Bloomberg Television interview. “The White House is fine with that if that’s where the conferees go and the conference committee goes.”