House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and President Obama corralled enough votes to overcome an outright Democrat rebellion by a slim 219 – 206 vote margin in the House of Representatives.
House Democrats threatened a government shutdown Thursday after leftist Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) urged Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to oppose the $1.1 trillion spending bill. Warren, who is now a member of the party leadership and widely thought to be the leftist alternative to Hillary Clinton in 2016, claimed the effort was to preserve the financial regulatory policy known as Dodd-Frank.
However, the deep divisions in the Democratic Party are apparently worse than the president initially estimated, as only 57 Democrats voted for the bill. House and Senate liberals couldn’t even agree on the one issue to oppose the bill over.
For instance, New York Rep. Nita Lowey, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, supported everything in the bill except for the provision allowing for an increase in limits on contributions to political parties. However, while she claims the provision is the fruit of the still Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, and Speaker Boehner, it isn’t at all an accurate claim.
“The Reid-Boehner provision to increase by tenfold the limits on contributions to political parties is excessive and also does not belong on this bill,” Ms. Lowey said on the House floor. Except, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) said the campaign finance provision had already been agreed to by Senate Democrats.
“Democrats in the Senate consented to it and, I suspect, participated in it,” Rep. Cole said.
President Obama and Vice President Biden were calling House Democrats appealing for their support. White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough also arrived on the Hill late Thursday to meet with the Democratic caucus to remind them that 70 House Democrats voted for a bill that included the very change to the Dodd-Frank regulations that they are now protesting.
Conservatives, to a far less extent, also had gripes with the bill. The protests involved the president’s recent executive action on immigration, which the members wanted to defund. However, some were voting no just to force a short-term continuing resolution so that the fight could again be waged with a far larger Republican majority in the House and new majority in the Senate.
“The fact of the matter is, if Democrats think they are going to renegotiate this in three months, they are going to have less leverage to do so,” White House Press Secretary Josh Ernest said earlier Thursday. “All the more reason for my Democratic colleagues to vote for the bill that’s on the floor now.”
The measure now moves to the Senate as a midnight funding deadline looms.
Government funding technically runs out at midnight Thursday, and lawmakers are expected to move on a stopgap measure to buy time, because the Senate debate could very well last through the weekend and even into Monday. If the bill passes in the Senate without amendment, the showdown can somewhat be interpreted as a victory for conservative Republicans only in the smallest measure.
Though current plan would fund the government through September 2015, immigration services would only be funded through late February. By that time, a new Republican Senate majority will have more leverage to wage a battle over the president’s widely denounced executive order on immigration.
AlanMacDonald / December 12, 2014
This article, which is representative of the low
level of factual reporting, says basically nothing of substance about
what issues the battle between the Vichy parties was really about.
And like the talking-bubble-heads on MSNBC and all other TV media,
and even the newspaper of record, talked only about how big a battle
it was, but nothing about the so-called ‘good things’ included in the
bill by the gutless Democrats for their screwed constituents, or the
often repeated lines of the political puppets and their leftish
pundits — “yes, the banking issue was bad but we have to look
to all the ‘good things’ we saved in this bill.”
WHAT? are the friggin ‘good things’ that the hard battling
Democrats got for the American people??
I can’t think of ANY — and I haven’t heard a Democrat pol or any
supposedly leftish, liberalish, progressive-ish pundit mention one,
even one, thing that was even slightly progressive — or that did
anything to stop the Disguised Global Empire that uses both these
dual Vichy parties for anything except further beggaring, oppressing,
looting from, and tyrannizing the people they are supposed to
represent in this political game which isn’t any kind of functional
democracy — but sure looks like an EMPIRE.
/