Congress approves a stopgap spending bill,
Congress votes to avert shutdown, but disaster bill hits snag
but fails to complete other priorities, including an $81 billion disaster aid package.
WASHINGTON — Congress approved a temporary spending bill to prevent a government shutdown, but it failed to complete work on an $81 billion disaster aid package to help Gulf Coast states, Puerto Rico and California recover from hurricanes and wildfires, as lawmakers scrambled Thursday to wrap up business before a Christmas break.
The stopgap measure continues federal operations for a few more weeks, setting up another deadline for Jan. 19. But it left undone a long list of priorities that members of both parties had hoped to finish this year.
The House approved the spending bill 231-188, with 14 Democrats joining a majority of the chamber’s Republicans. The Senate quickly followed, voting 6632 to avert a federal shutdown Friday.
The disaster aid package, though, the largest in U.S. history, ran into trouble. It passed the House 251-169, on a bipartisan vote, but was blocked in the Senate, where it required 60 votes.
The $81 billion measure would have brought this year’s tally for aid to hurricane victims in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and other parts of the Caribbean, as well as fire-ravaged California, to more than $130 billion. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate want changes, and it was among the items Democrats sought to hold onto for leverage next year.
“Democrats want to make sure that we have equal bargaining, and we’re not going to allow things like disaster relief go forward without discussing some of the other issues we care about,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Conservative groups, meanwhile, opposed the disaster measure for increasing spending too much.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky decided not to bring the measure up for a vote.
Lawmakers plan to try again in the new year.
Among the other unresolved issues is protection for the young immigrants called Dreamers, who face the threat of deportation starting in March because of President Donald Trump’s decision to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which allowed them to stay and work in the U.S.
Gaining a permanent legislative fix for the Dreamers, young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children, was a top priority for Democrats.
More than 1,000 Dreamers and advocates continued protests and lawmaker visits Thursday at the Capitol. In the end, moderate Democrats said they would not risk a government shutdown at this point over the issue. Party leaders promised to fight out the issue in January.
“There’s a lot of justifiable anger and disappointment that the Dream Act didn’t pass before the holidays, but we remain optimistic that we’re going to get it done,” said Frank Sharry, executive director at America’s Voice, an immigrant-advocacy organization.
Passage of both the yearend spending bill and the disaster aid package had been uncertain as the Republican majority, particularly in the House, fought over priorities. Defense hawks pushed unsuccessfully for a big boost in military spending. Conservatives opposed the disaster package unless it included offsetting cuts to other programs.
In the House, Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., appealed to GOP lawmakers to capitalize on the unified front they had shown in passing the tax-cut bill.
“Let’s stand together, be a team,” Ryan urged lawmakers in a private meeting, according to a person present in the room who was not authorized to speak on the record. Ryan told lawmakers that their divisions served up opportunities for Democrats to leverage their votes for their own priorities.
Trump echoed that message in a morning tweet urging passage of what’s called a continuing resolution: “House Democrats want a SHUTDOWN for the holidays in order to distract from the very popular, just passed, Tax Cuts. House Republicans, don’t let this happen. Pass the C.R. TODAY and keep our Government OPEN!”
The stop-gap spending bill would fund three more months of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, which provides insurance for nearly 9 million children nationwide. Congress has been deadlocked on a longer-term renewal of the popular program, and several states are on the verge of running out of money to keep it open.
The bill would also extend for a few weeks the National Security Agency’s legal authority for domestic surveillance of emails, which is set to expire at the end of the month. The debate over major reforms in the program would be punted, along with many other issues, into the new year.
The spending measure will keep most government operations running at existing levels, with some slight boosts for the military but not the big increase sought by defense hawks.
Republicans made good on a promise to shield Medicare and other programs from steep cuts that could result if the justpassed GOP tax plan adds to deficits, which it is expected to do. The stopgap spending measure would waive so-called payas-you-go spending rules, which threatened to cause automatic cuts.
Congress has often waived that rule in the past, but Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., objected to waiving it again.
“Do federal deficits matter?” he asked.
Paul’s effort to block the waiver, though, was rejected, with only seven other senators, all conservative Republicans, voting with him to allow the automatic cuts.