Congress Passes Bill Extending Gov’t Funding For Another 5- Days

U.S. House of Representatives on Friday passed a short-term government spending bill to avoid a government shutdown hours before midnight when current short-term spending bill will expire.

Controversial issues driving a wedge between Republicans and President Barack Obama’s Democrats plagued the negotiations.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday passed a bill funding the government through Wednesday, giving congressional negotiators more time to work on a $1.15 trillion bill paying for federal programs through September.

“Republicans’ insistence on including unsafe, harmful policies in the spending bill has halted progress”, Nita Lowey of NY, the top Democrat on the appropriations panel, said. They are pushing to lift a 40-year-old ban on oil exports, roll back some of the Obama administration’s environmental and financial regulations, and halt the admission of refugees from Syria and Iraq while the administration overhauls the refugee-vetting process. This stop-gap spending bill will give lawmakers more time to debate what the government should and shouldn’t fund in the final omnibus bill.

“We’re not going to allow Democrats to jam us with hard deadlines”, Republican John Fleming said.

House Democrats, who’ve sought to draw attention to their push for gun control legislation in the wake of recent mass shootings, emphasized a new demand during the day as they announced their opposition to any bill that doesn’t undo a longstanding provision that has been interpreted to block the Centers for Disease Control from conducting research on gun violence.

Negotiations are expected to continue through the weekend, but a Democratic aide said Thursday they remained far apart with dozens of outstanding issues to be resolved.

“This is one where we were served up a particular deck of cards, if you will, and we’ve got to play it in order to keep from getting a shutdown”.

“Not every piece of legislation we’re going to agree on every part of it. But i think the underlying legislation we present today is a product of bipartisan cooperation and compromise and give and take”, Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said Friday. The White House has said he will sign it.

And he complained that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a fellow Republican, may get a campaign finance provision inserted in the bill that critics say would increase the influence of wealthy donors to political parties.

But House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (D-Wis.) declined to commit to meeting the new deadline of Wednesday to pass a bill.

“I expect that by early next week we’ll have a bill that the state and federal government can sign off on”, Feinstein said in a statement.

Even though the new deadline is Wednesday, Ryan suggested that was a moving target if negotiations stalled. The legislation Congress is working on would retroactively restore and extend them so taxpayers could claim the breaks on their 2015 and 2016 returns.