No government shutdown — for now.
The House passes a temporary funding bill to keep the government running through Dec. 22.
WASHINGTON — Congress on Thursday passed a stopgap spending bill to prevent a government shutdown this weekend and buy time for challenging talks on a wide range of unfinished business on Capitol Hill.
In the House, the measure passed mostly along party lines, 235-193. About an hour later, the Senate voted 81-14 for the spending bill to keep the government open through Dec. 22. The bill now heads to President Donald Trump for his expected signature.
The vote came as Trump and top congressional leaders in both parties huddled to discuss a range of unfinished bipartisan business on Capitol Hill, including the budget, a key children’s health program and aid to hurricane-slammed Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida — and, for Democrats and many Republicans, protections for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.
“We had a productive conversation on a wide variety of issues. Nothing specific has been agreed to, but discussions continue,” said Capitol Hill’s top Democrats, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, ticking off Democratic priorities including domestic spending increases, funding for veterans and money to battle opioid abuse, immigration and health care.
GOP leaders promised help for immigrants known by their supporters as Dreamers. Spokesmen for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said GOP leaders “stressed the need to address border security, interior enforcement and other parts of our broken immigration system,” adding that the tricky immigration issue “should be a separate process and not used to hold hostage funding for our men and women in uniform.”
Pelosi insisted Thursday that any year-end deal solve the immigration issue. The immigrants face deportation in a few months because Trump reversed administrative protections provided to them by former President Barack Obama.
Pelosi’s stance was noteworthy because GOP leaders are likely to require Democratic votes for the spending bill.
The conservative House Freedom Caucus had resisted the stopgap measure. But on Thursday, the group’s chairman, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said it would help the measure pass to avoid distractions from the GOP drive to push their $1.5 trillion tax bill through Congress this month.
Key Republican lawmakers oppose efforts to scale back a proposed cut in the corporate income tax rate to pay for other tax breaks.
Both the House and Senate tax packages would reduce the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent. However, negotiators have been discussing whether to set the corporate rate at 22 percent to help pay for an expanded deduction for state and local income taxes and other provisions.
Both the House and Senate tax packages would provide steep tax cuts to businesses and more modest tax breaks for families and individuals.
Lawmakers are struggling to find additional revenue to help pay to sweeten some of the tax breaks for both individuals and businesses. They are working under the constraints of Senate budget rules, which limit the overall size of the tax package to $1.5 trillion over the next decade.
Both the House and Senate tax bills initially repealed the entire deduction for state and local taxes, a tax break enjoyed by more than 43 million taxpayers last year. Both bills have since been amended to allow homeowners to deduct up to $10,000 in property taxes.
The provision was a compromise among Republicans from high-tax states such as New York and New Jersey. California Republicans are pushing for an amendment to let taxpayers deduct local income taxes, too, and they appear to have an ally in McConnell, who called the proposal a “reasonable idea.” It is unclear how much it would cost to expand the tax break.