President Obama signs massive $1.1T spending package
President Obama on Friday signed a $1.1 trillion spending package to fund the government through next September, averting the risk of a government shutdown for a while.
Earlier in the day, the House passed the 2,009-page measure 316-113 despite some uncertainty about its fate a day earlier. Some Democrats expressed opposition to the bill, as did a number of conservatives because of various policy provisions tucked inside.
The Senate also voted 65-33 in favor of the package, which included a bill to extend expired tax breaks that the House passed on Thursday.
The measure removes the threat of a government shutdown until Sept. 30, about a month before the 2016 elections.
Congressional leaders reached the deal late Tuesday, posting the bill in the wee hours on Wednesday, after weeks of negotiations over contentious policy riders.
Hours after its release, House Democrats began to raise concerns with the deal because they said its lifting of the 40-year-old ban on crude oil exports could send American jobs overseas. They also questioned why the spending package didn't address Puerto Rico's debt crisis.
Some conservatives in both chambers, meanwhile, had complained that the bill would significantly increase H-2B visas to foreign workers and would infringe on Americans' privacy due to the cybersecurity provisions.
On Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said she would vote in favor of the bill, but said she wasn't confident she could push it over the finish line with Democratic votes if it needed them. Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, on the other hand, said he felt "pretty good" about the state of play.
The repeal of the decades-old crude oil export ban was considered a major win for Republicans, who at the same time, did not score certain provisions that conservatives had demanded.
Aides said Democrats beat back about 150 policy riders that were proposed by the GOP. There are no riders, for example, that target the Dodd-Frank Wall Street financial reform law or environmental regulations, and there is no campaign finance provision that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, had been pushing.
The spending bill also doesn't include GOP riders that would have targeted the U.S.'s new policy to normalize relations with Cuba or the Obama administration's plan to take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year.
Among the other Democratic wins, the measure contains an agreement to reauthorize the Zadroga Act, which provides health and compensation benefits to first responders from 9/11 as well as victims and their families. The bill would extend the health fund through 2090 at a $3.5 billion cost. The compensation fund would be funded for five years for $4.6 billion.
Democrats, meanwhile, were unsuccessful in their bid to remove language that has prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from researching gun violence for nearly 20 years. Congress has included that provision since 1996, and Republicans have said a spending bill is not the place to target the Second Amendment.
