Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
House sends Senate spending bill
Legislation’s size, speed of vote invite bipartisan praise, grumbling
WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday passed a $1.3 trillion spending bill that makes good on President Donald Trump’s promises to increase military funding while blocking most of his proposed cuts to domestic programs and placing obstacles in his immigration agenda.
The 2,232-page bill, which was released just before 8 p.m. Wednesday, would keep government agencies operating through September. Congressional leaders muscled the bill through the chamber, tossing aside rules to ensure careful deliberation of legislation to meet a government shutdown deadline of midnight today.
The bill includes dozens of miscellaneous provisions, such as fixes to the recent GOP tax bill, a measure on employee tips and language codifying that minor-league baseball players are exempt from federal labor laws. The spending bill is widely expected to be the last major legislation that Congress will pass before the November midterm elections, which has increased pressure to pack the bill full of odds and ends.
The bill passed on a 256167 vote after leaders of both parties hailed the compromise. At the White House, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Trump would sign the bill.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said it fulfilled Trump’s governing agenda, including by increasing military spending and funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“This bill starts construction on the wall,” he told reporters. “It funds our war on opioids. It invests in infrastructure. It funds school safety and mental health. But what this bill is ultimately about, what we’ve fought for for so long, is finally giving our military the tools and the resources it needs to do the job.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the bill “a tremendous victory for the American people,” one that keeps domestic agencies robustly funded while turning away Trump’s push for more border wall and immigration enforcement money.
“If you want to think you’re getting a wall, just think it and sign the bill,” she said.
Broadly, defense spending is set to jump $80 billion over previously authorized spending levels, while domestic spending rises by $63 billion.
But there were plenty of grumbles in all corners of Capitol Hill about the rapid process that has left lawmakers and aides poring through text to see exactly what the bill will do. House GOP leaders waived their own rules requiring any bill going to the floor to be posted for at least three days, and none of the more than a dozen lawmakers surveyed Thursday said they had read the entire bill.
“There’s no way humanly possible to read 2,232 pages,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who is opposed to the bill. “Sometimes they jam you, but they pretend to give you three days to read it. All the veneer is off now.”
Even Democrats who planned to support the compromise railed against the speed of the bill’s consideration.
“No matter what you think about the bill, this process is something we have to stand up and say is unacceptable,” Rep. Jim McGovern, R-Mass., said on the House floor.
House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, acknowledged the circumstances were not ideal.
“There was a good, hard work put into this, and the answer is we are going to move forward and take care of funding our military properly and the rest of the government,” he said. “I, like you, see the frailties in what we do, and they’re enormous and they’re gaping holes, but we had to do what we had to do.”
Besides the looming shutdown deadline, one consideration prompting the quick vote, congressional aides said, was the funeral today for the late Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y. Dozens of members were planning to fly to Rochester, N.Y., for the service.
Other lawmakers are set to leave on official delegations abroad as soon as today, aides said, taking advantage of the two-week congressional break for Easter and Passover.
“They just don’t want to be around when the young people come to town,” Pelosi quipped, referring to a gun-control march that students planned for Saturday.
Ahead of the vote, House leaders were confident that the compromise would gain enough bipartisan support to get the bill through the chamber Thursday — much as a precursor budget agreement generated brief fury only to pass on a comfortable bipartisan vote in the pre-dawn hours.
“The members know what is at stake,” House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said late Wednesday after leaving House meetings during which his whip team began counting votes for the bill. “We have to pay our troops and support our president.”
At the White House, Trump’s top advisers worked to put the best face on a package they conceded fell short of fully funding his priorities and contained many items he would rather not have swallowed.
“In order to get the defense spending, primarily, but all the rest of our priorities funded, we had to give away a lot of stuff that we didn’t want to give away” to Democrats, Mulvaney told reporters during a briefing in which he also highlighted funding for immigration enforcement, school safety measures, combating the opioid crisis, workforce development and infrastructure.
“My job is to get the president’s priorities funded, which this does,” added Mulvaney, a onetime budget hawk in Congress who routinely voted against large spending packages and sidestepped a question on whether he would have done so for the measure now before lawmakers. “The president wants it to pass and wants it to be signed.”
Trump declared victory for his priorities in a tweet late Wednesday.
“Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming,” he wrote. Most importantly, he said, were the wins in defense spending. “Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment,” he conceded.
NOW TO THE SENATE
Attention now turns to the Senate, where unanimous consent from all members would be needed to waive procedural rules and set up votes before tonight’s deadline.
That means any one senator
could delay the proceedings and force a brief shutdown, much as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., did in February, when he held up consideration of the previous budget bill.
Paul said Wednesday that he had not decided how he would handle the new bill, telling reporters that he would wait to read it first. But he made clear that he was unlikely to be pleased by its contents.
“I think it is safe to say that there are many voices in the Senate, including many Republicans, who are not real happy about having a 1,000-page bill crammed down our throat at the last minute without time to read it,” he said.
On Thursday morning, Paul tweeted that it had taken more than two hours to print out the bill so he could review it.
Ahead of Thursday’s House vote, some Republican lawmakers said they were opposing the measure because of what they considered excessive spending. Some Democrats were opposed because it lacked language renewing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Trump has ended the program, which temporarily lets some young illegal aliens who were brought to the U.S. as children stay in the U.S.
If a holdout senator or senators delay the bill’s passage past midnight, that would prompt the year’s third federal shutdown, an event likely to be brief but that would still embarrass a GOP that controls the White House and Congress.
The bill’s release was delayed for two days as leaders haggled over provisions sprinkled throughout the bill.
One hotly disputed matter concerned funding for the Gateway program, a major New York-area infrastructure project. At Trump’s behest, Republicans succeeded in eliminating some provisions favoring the $30 billion project, which includes building a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. But project backers said it would still be eligible for hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.
The dickering played out for hours Wednesday, even after top congressional leaders left a morning meeting on Capitol Hill declaring that a deal was at hand.
Democrats pressed particularly hard to block Trump’s requests to fund a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and to beef up immigration enforcement capacity.
The bill includes $1.6 billion in funding for construction of a border wall, but that number is far short of the $25 billion in long-term funding that the administration sought. Democrats also won tight restrictions on how that money can be spent.
One late-breaking deal involved gun laws. Democrats agreed to add bipartisan legislation to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System for gun buyers, while Republicans agreed to add language making clear that federal funds can be spent on research into gun violence — clarifying a long-standing restriction that has been interpreted as preventing such research.
Information for this article was contributed by Mike DeBonis, Erica Werner, Robert Costa, Ed O’Keefe, Josh Dawsey and Seung Min Kim of The Washington Post; by Andrew Taylor, Lisa Mascaro, Jill Colvin, Alan Fram and Matthew Daly of The Associated Press; and by Thomas Kaplan of The New York Times.