Congress Passes Stopgap Spending Bill
Politico reports:
Heading for the exits, Congress approved a stopgap spending bill to keep the government operating for the next two months and set up a major budget fight in November when lawmakers return after the elections.
Senate approval came on a 69-30 roll call Wednesday evening with 11 Republicans joining in support. The House debate—which spilled past midnight—ended on a more party-line 228-194 vote with one just one Republican voting in support.
The House clerk’s office records Thursday show that to have been Rep. Anh “ Joseph” Cao, from a traditionally Democratic district in Louisiana—not Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) as mistakenly reported by POLITICO based on floor information at the time.
Democrats now go home clearly defensive about their failure to pass a budget resolution or any of the 12 annual appropriations bills for the new fiscal year that begins Friday. But the final skirmishing before adjournment exposed a real split among Republicans over the level of spending cuts the party is committed to in the next Congress.
The Senate GOP proposed only a 5 percent reduction from the stopgap bill, and even then, the leadership was party to a deal that all but guaranteed that the amendment would fail.
By comparison, House Republicans orchestrated a procedural vote hours later in a vain attempt to force Democrats to allow them to make cuts nearly three times the size of what the Senate GOP had proposed. The effort failed 240-186 but not before disparaging asides by Republican aides about the Senate’s performance.
At the center of the dispute is the House Republican’s new “Pledge to America” platform, which would roll back total domestic and foreign aid appropriations to the levels last approved by former President George W. Bush in late 2007. That translates into an 18 percent cut from the same appropriations today or an estimated $62 billion less than the already reduced spending levels in the continuing resolution Wednesday night.
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