The House on Wednesday approved a controversial budget plan that most Republicans opposed, in what was likely to be House Speaker John Boehner’s last major legislative push before retiring on Friday.
The budget agreement will allow the government to exceed spending caps for the next two years and suspend the nation’s borrowing limit in exchange for modest entitlement reform.
The bill passed thanks to bipartisan support, with the majority of votes coming from Democrats who, conservatives complained, may have gotten the better end of the deal.
Republicans split more than two-to-one against it — the GOP vote was 79-167. Every Democrat supported the bill. The final vote was 266-167.
The measure now moves to the Senate, where conservatives are vowing to oppose it and where Democratic votes will again be required for passage. The White House said Wednesday that President Obama supports its passage to avoid a debt ceiling crisis that otherwise would hit Nov. 3.
The bill raises spending by $80 billion over the next two fiscal years and it suspends the nation’s borrowing limit until March 2017, which were the top items on the Democratic wish list.
But lawmakers in both parties praised the deal for eliminating the so-called sequester cuts.
“This will roll back the harmful, automatic meat-ax approach of sequestration cuts which gut important federal programs and slice the good with the bad, including slicing into our military strength,” said Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who helped craft the deal, said it “creates jobs, protects senior and invests in our future.”
Entitlement reform included in the deal would come in the form of greater scrutiny of the Social Security Disability Insurance program, where fraud is rampant and is costing the nation tens of millions of dollars, according to some government estimates.
The bill also includes a provision that would eliminate an Obamacare requirement that automatically enrolls employees in employer-sponsored health insurance.
