Senate sends $1.1 trillion spending bill to Trump

The Senate WASHINGTON — has delivered to President Donald Trump the first significant legislation of his presidency, a bipartisan $1.1 trillion spending bill that would keep the government running through September

— putting off, for now, battles over Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall and his promised military buildup.

The lopsided, 79-18 Senate vote sends the huge bill to the White House in plenty of time to avert a midnight Friday shutdown deadline.

Negotiators on the bill dropped Trump’s demands for a down payment on his oft-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but his signature would buy five months of funding stability while lawmakers argue over the wall and over Trump’s demands for a huge military buildup matched by cuts to popular domestic programs and foreign aid accounts.

The House passed the measure Wednesday on a big bipartisan vote, though 103 of the chamber’s conservative Republicans opposed the bill.

The White House and its GOP allies praised $15 billion in additional Pentagon spending obtained by Trump and $1.5 billion in emergency border security funds but was denied funding to begin construction work on the border wall.

“After years of an administration that failed to get serious on border security, this bill provides the largest border-security funding increase in a decade,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a key negotiator.

Democrats and the pragmatic Republicans who negotiated the bill successfully defended other accounts targeted by Trump, such as foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, support for the arts and economic development grants.

The sweeping 1,665-page bill also increases spending for NASA, medical research, and the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies.

Democrats praised the measure as an example of bipartisan cooperation in the handling of the 12 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government. It reflects bipartisanship among congressional appropriators, who long ago sorted out many of the spending fights Trump wants to renew this summer — over foreign aid, funding for the arts, Amtrak subsidies, grants to state and local governments, and development agencies like the Appalachian Regional Commission.

“On a bipartisan basis, we rejected President Trump’s ill-considered proposal to slash domestic programs by $15 billion, including deep cuts for NIH and low-income energy assistance. Instead, this bill includes a $2 billion increase for the National Institutes of Health,” said a top Democratic negotiator, Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont, who called the bill “a good deal for the American people.”

Trump took to Twitter earlier this week to complain about the bipartisan process that produced the measure but changed course to praise the additional spending for the military and border security. The White House has said he will sign the bill.

But the fight isn’t over. One of Trump’s tweets advocated for a “good shutdown” this fall to fix the “mess” that produced the bill. And many rankand-file Republicans saw the bill as a lost opportunity for a fight that could have produced victories on the wall and punishing “sanctuary” cities that fail to cooperate with immigration authorities.

“It is a win for Democrats and a loss for conservatives,” said tea party Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va. “We have a Republican in the White House and control of both chambers of Congress yet this legislation fails to include key conservative reforms Republicans have long-advocated.”

Even supporters of the bill dislike the secretive, closeddoor negotiations that produced it while denying anyone the opportunity to amend it.

“Is there any member of the United States Senate that has read this?” asked Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. “And many of us are going to be compelled to vote for it because we don’t want to shut the government down.”

House WASHINGTON — Republicans took a major step toward their long-promised goal of unwinding the stricter financial rules created after the 2008 crisis, pushing forward sweeping legislation that would undo much of President Barack Obama’s landmark banking law.

A House panel on Thursday approved Republican-written legislation that would gut much of the Dodd-Frank law enacted by Democrats and signed by Obama in an effort to prevent a recurrence of the Great Recession. The party-line vote in the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee was 34-26.

“I can’t do a good James Brown, but I feel good,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the normally reserved Republican chairman of the committee, referring to the singer often called the godfather of soul. Hensarling wrote much of the overhaul legislation.

Republicans argued that the law passed under President Barack Obama is slowing economic growth because of the cost of compliance and by curbing lending.

Democrats warned the GOP bill will create the same conditions that led to the financial crisis and pushed the economy to the brink of collapse.

Rep. Maxine Waters, the panel’s senior Democrat, called it “a deeply misguided measure that would bring harm to consumers, investors and our whole economy.”

“The bill is rotten to the core and incredibly divisive,” Waters said. “It’s also dead on arrival in the Senate, and has no chance of becoming law.”

After attempts in recent years to overhaul the DoddFrank legislation, the Republicans were heartened this time by a sympathetic Republican White House. President Donald Trump has denounced Dodd-Frank and promised that his administration would “do a big number” on it.

The new bill now goes to the full House for a vote, but supporters admit that the path will be much more difficult in the Senate, where Democratic support will be needed.

In a fast-moving session after two days of laborious debate, the panel flew through a series of votes on amendments, as the majority Republicans easily beat back Democrats’ attempts to reshape and soften the legislation.