12-10-2014
Government shutdown avoided as leaders agree omnibus spending bill with watered-down Republican conditions
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| John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House, after Republicans and Democrats struck a $1.1tn budget deal to avoid a government shutdown. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters |
With barely 48 hours left to avert another government shutdown, US congressional leaders have struck a $1.1tn federal budget deal that avoids most of the threatened Republican attacks on the Obama administration but leaves open a potential future challenge on immigration.
The 1,603 page omnibus spending bill keeps overall expenditure at roughly the same level agreed by Congressman Paul Ryan and Senator Patty Murray in a two-year deal that ended a similar showdown last year.
But attempts by conservatives to extract political penalties from Democrats in return for largely agreeing to administration spending requests have been watered down in last-minute negotiations between party leaders, leaving a smaller than feared number of “riders” attached to the bill. Among these is a provision to prevent the District of Columbia enacting marijuana legalisation measures that Washington voters had backed during November’s election.
Wall Street lobbyists also succeeded in watering down elements of the Dodd-Frank banking reforms with technical changes to rules governing financial swaps that will relax their use in hedging and structured finance deals, although other concessions sought by banks do not appear in the final text.
A related but separate National Defence Appropriations Act contained similar evidence of corporate tinkering attached to must-pass legislation, this time in the shape of a controversial deal backed by the Arizona senator John McCain that allowed the mining group Rio Tinto to carry out copper mining on Native American tribal land.
Further such riders may emerge on Wednesday in the main budget omnibus as lawmakers and journalists pore over the fine print of the mammoth bill but conservative Republicans are mostly angry that more is not being done to block Obama’s controversial immigration reforms.
Instead Republican leaders have agreed to postpone the issue until next spring, when they will have control of both houses of Congress, by only funding the Department of Homeland Security until the end of February.
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