The House of Representatives passed a long-term spending bill Thursday night, just hours before the current continuing budget resolution is set to run out. The vote of 219 to 206, including nearly 60 Democrats, took longer than the alotted 15 minutes as House members from both parties witheld their votes for several minutes.
The bill, nicknamed a “CRomnibus” in the press, is a hybrid of an omnibus approprations bill that will fund the government through late 2015 and a short-term continuing resolution, which will allow the Congress to address funding for the Department of Homeland Security early next year.
The bill was crafted as a compromise between congressional appropriators, who advocated a clean long-term spending bill, and conservative Republicans who were pushing for a short-term fix ahead of the funding deadline. In the conservatives’ view, pushing the long-term spending bill to the next Congress, when both houses would be in GOP hands, would give Republicans better leverage to withold funds and fight President Obama’s executive order on immigiration. House speaker John Boehner has not committed to blocking funding for DHS’s immigration programs in the next Congress.
But the CRomnibus nearly failed to pass, with many liberal Democrats (including minority leader Nancy Pelosi) joining some conservatives in opposition. Pelosi and liberals objected to a policy rider offered by House Republicans that they said gutted financial regulations borne out of the Dodd-Frank bill passed in 2009.
