Lawmakers clash over abortion spending on deadline

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers are locked in a debate over Obamacare subsidy funding and abortion, just days before a major federal government budget deadline and potential shutdown.

Yesterday Republicans floated a proposal, backed by President Trump, to restore Obamacare subsidies that Trump slashed last year. Trump had decried the payments, designed to stabilize premium rates of plans offered on health care exchanges, as a windfall for insurance companies.

While Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) cosponsored a bipartisan bill to restore the funding, prospects of bipartisan support for the spending bill proposal quickly faded yesterday as lawmakers clashed over a provision that would restrict funding to insurance providers that cover abortion procedures.

In a statement, Murray said she was “disappointed that Republicans are rallying behind a new partisan bill that includes a lastminute, harmful restriction on abortion coverage for private insurance companies instead of working with Democrats to wrap up what have been bipartisan efforts to reduce health care costs.”

It is unclear whether lawmakers, who have wrangled over language to restore the health care subsidies, can come of an accord before Friday to include the measure in the $1.3 trillion spending bill.

The broad-spending legislation — which must pass by midnight Friday to avoid a gap in federal funding, including increased funding in a host of measures for military spending, infrastructure, the opioid crisis and several domestic programs — the result of months of bipartisan negotiations.

But there are still a number of sticking points in the legislation, including the Obamacare subsidy measure, that have Republicans and Democrats at loggerheads.

Lawmakers rejected a plan floated by the White House last week to provide temporary protection to young illegal immigrants who had enrolled in the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in exchange for funding for a border wall on the nation’s southern border.

Democrats said the plan, which Trump said he would back if attached to the omnibus spending bill, doesn’t go far enough to protect so-called Dreamers, while Republican opponents of the measure criticized the plan for not addressing changes to family migration rules and the diversity visa.

Meanwhile, Trump himself has threatened to reject the spending bill to stop $900 million in funding to the Hudson River Gateway Project — a move to spite Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer of New York.