House faces close vote on $1.01 trillion spending bill

By Ed O'Keefe
December 11 at 6:03 PM - The Washington Post

Just hours before a possible government shutdown, House leaders were struggling to shore up support for a sweeping bill to fund most of the federal government, change campaign finance laws and make it harder for the District of Columbia to legalize marijuana.

The White House said President Obama supports the bill and would sign it, but also criticized lawmakers for using the 1,603-page bill to tweak financial regulations and campaign donation limits.

Uncertainty about the bill developed after a last-minute Democratic revolt against a spending package they helped negotiate. In a notable public break with the White House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) used a floor speech to blast Obama and Republicans for backing the bill. She announced that she vote no on the bill, raising concerns that the measure rolls back regulations on risky Wall Street trading and repeals key provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory rules.

“I’m enormously disappointed that the White House feels that the only way they can get a bill is to go along with this. That would be the only reason I think they would say they would sign such a bill,” she said.

Pelosi warned that Democrats were “being blackmailed” by Republicans to pass the bill with just hours until a possible shutdown.

A vote on the $1.01 trillion package was abruptly postponed moments later. Earlier, the bill had barely survived a procedural vote when all Democrats present and roughly a dozen Republicans voted against the rule setting up debate.

In a scramble to shore up support, senior Democratic and GOP aides said the president, his staff and Democratic senators were making calls to House Democrats. White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was dispatched to Capitol Hill to lobby for the bill in a hastily-arranged meeting, and House Democrats planned to huddle and determine how to proceed in the next few hours. Vice President Joseph Biden was phoning Democratic legislators as well.

Government funding expires at midnight Thursday and the House is also expected to approve a short-term extension of current funding to give the Senate — with its arcane procedural rules — a few more days to work on the bill. Republicans were also poised to pass a three-month stopgap bill to keep the government open if the spending legislation didn’t win enough Democratic votes, making another shutdown unlikely despite the last-minute showdown.

Rep. James P. Moran (D-Va.), a big supporter of the spending bill, was visibly frustrated that his colleagues were mulling a temporary continuing resolution for 90 days, since Republicans will control all of Congress when it expires.

 He said it would be a "travesty" if Democrats fail to pass the bipartisan spending bill.

Exiting House Speaker John A. Boehner’s office just as House Democrats were scheduled to huddle separately, Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-N.C.) said Republicans were waiting on their colleagues across the aisle before making their next move.

“We want to see to how the Dems come out of their caucus. It’s going to take a while,” he said.

Pittenger said Republicans still intend to pass the bill without alterations.

“I hope we don’t have to change anything to it,” said the congressman.

“Let’s go govern,” he concluded.

Boehner (R-Ohio) predicted that the bill would pass with bipartisan support.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was confident of passage as well.

“We’re getting out of here today. You’re going to miss me,” he told reporters as he walked into Boehner’s office Thursday morning.

Republican support appeared to be building throughout the day despite concerns that the legislation won’t go far enough in punishing Obama for using his executive authority to change immigration policy.

Rep. Bill Flores (R-Tex.), the incoming chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, predicted that at least one-third of his group’s 170-plus members would vote no. He said he would likely vote no because “my constituents are telling me that they’re against it. I think that it would be hard to totally stop the president’s unlawful amnesty action, but I think we could try a little bit harder to fix it.”

House Democratic aides have privately warned in recent days about widespread opposition to the spending plan amid concerns over big changes to campaign spending laws and Wall Street regulations. A wave of Democratic “no” votes would be a victory for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a popular figure on the left. Warren used a Senate floor speech Wednesday to warn that the bill sharply increases the influence of wealthy campaign donors, saying the measure reflected “the worst of government for the rich and powerful.”

At a closed-door leadership meeting Thursday morning, Pelosi and her team called for a wait-and-see approach as they tried one more time to get Boehner to change the bill, which would undo a pillar of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul by freeing banks to more readily trade the exotic investments known as derivatives. The legislation ranks among the administration’s biggest domestic achievements. Another controversial provision would permit a wealthy couple to give as much as $3.1 million to political parties, three times the current limit..

“Right now they’re just saying keep your powder dry,” Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) said as he emerged from the meeting. He said that he doesn’t like the bill, “but I absolutely don’t like shutting down the government.”

Republican aides said that Pelosi’s requests already had been rebuffed — and that 70 Democrats had already voted once before to relax the Wall Street regulations included in the spending bill.

The campaign finance and Wall Street provisions, “like the entire bill, were the result of a bipartisan, bicameral process,” Michael Steel, a Boehner spokesman, said in an e-mail. “If Rep. Pelosi doesn’t think her negotiators did a good job, she should discuss it with them – but sour grapes doesn’t mean she gets to rewrite the deal after the fact.”

In the Senate, members of both parties have expressed serious objections to the plan, raising the specter that some might use procedural delays to block or slow the legislation.

On Wednesday, Warren repeatedly declined to say whether she would block or slow the spending bill. Conservatives, including Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), have also raised concerns but haven’t said what they might do to derail the bill.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is traveling to Iowa on Monday as he mulls a 2016 presidential bid, said Thursday that he would vote against the bill. While it includes increased funding for veterans’ health care — one of Sanders’s top priorities — he called the changes in Wall Street regulations “totally absurd.”

“It’s more austerity for working people,” he said. “It’s a budget that does not reflect the needs of the working families of this country.”

Paul Kane, Sean Sullivan and Aaron C. Davis contributed to this report.