Chad’s Morning Brief: Boehner and Obama Work Together As House Passes Spending Bill, Congress Randy Neugebauer Votes Against, and Other Top Stories
Here is your Morning Brief for December 12, 2014.
House Passes $1.1 Trillion in Spending
House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama worked together last night to get a spending bill through the House. Boehner needed all the Democratic support he could get as 67 Republicans voted against the measure according to FOX News.
"We will not have a government shutdown," Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., pledged.
Passage in the House followed hours of urgent appeals from an unlikely alliance: President Obama and House GOP leadership.
Obama and Vice President Biden worked the phones to sway Democratic lawmakers. White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough also met on the Hill with the Democratic caucus. Despite sources inside the meeting initially saying he did little to persuade lawmakers, a rift emerged in the Democratic leadership late Thursday. As House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi continued to oppose the bill, her deputy, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., urged passage.
Meanwhile, House GOP leaders did what they could to sway conservative members who, for different reasons, were opposed to the package.
In the end, 67 Republicans defected, but 57 Democrats voted for it.
Many conservatives opposed the bill because it does not attack Obama's immigration executive actions, while liberal Democrats were angry over provisions dealing with campaign spending and financial regulation.
The debate saw Pelosi flexing her clout, recognizing that House Speaker John Boehner needed Democrats to pass the bill.
She pushed back not only against GOP leaders but Obama's lobbying effort.
In a rare public rebuke of the president, Pelosi said she was "enormously disappointed" he had decided to embrace the bill, which she described as an attempt at legislative blackmail by House Republicans.
Pelosi, D-Calif., sent an email note to colleagues in the afternoon saying they had "leverage" to make demands -- namely, to remove two provisions her party doesn't like. They are: a provision rolling back one of the regulations imposed on the financial industry in the wake of the economic collapse of 2008, and one that permits wealthy contributors to increase the size of their donations to political parties for national conventions, election recounts or the construction of a headquarters building.
Right before the vote, according to a source in the room, Pelosi told lawmakers: “We have enough votes to show them never to do this again.”
But perhaps an overriding desire on both sides not to risk another government shutdown prevailed.
The current plan would fund the government through September 2015, but immigration services only through late February, teeing up a battle over immigration for early 2015.
Shortly after the vote, the House passed a short-term funding bill to allow the Senate to debate the massive spending bill over the next two days.
Congressman Randy Neugebauer of Lubbock voted against the spending bill. Now the battle heads to the Senate where Senator Elizabeth Warren has been a vocal critic of the legislation.
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