UPDATE: The House passed the massive spending bill.
Looks like Senate short term vote tonight and vote tomorrow on bill:
You know what comes next:
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Before the vote:
The clock is ticking toward midnight, and we’ve gotten exactly nowhere on getting the “cromnibus” spending bill passed. Both caucuses are whipping furiously both for and against the bill (bipartisanship?) and even President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have picked up the phone to try to convince embattled Democrats to ok the spending provisions.
Rumors are flying, however, that worries over Republican leadership agreed to pull the cromnibus bill:
I’m hearing from two sources, including one Republican lawmaker, that Representative Marlin Stutzman (R., Ind.) provided one of the final, decisive votes needed to clear a crucial procedural hurdle because House leadership promised to pull the cromnibus and replace it with a short-term continuing resolution that would push the entire funding debate into next year.An aide to House speaker John Boehner says he made no such pledge. Stutzman’s office did not reply immediately to a request for comment.Rank-and-file Republicans who want the House to withhold funding for President Obama’s executive orders on immigration proposed such a short-term CR during a conference meeting Wednesday, but Boehner told them that Senate Republicans opposed the idea.“The fact that the House has recessed tells me leadership is worried,” the House Republican source says, noting that they also had to recess during the summer border crisis fight — when a conservative revolt, rather than a Democratic one, forced them to modify their proposals. “That tells me that they are reevaluating,” the lawmaker suggests, with the likeliest options being whether to stick with the cromnibus as written or move to a short-term continuing resolution.
This thing narrowly passed (214-212—they closed the vote just as enough votes ticked up in favor of proceeding) a procedural vote, so I can see why leadership would be worried at this point. I think it’s fair and wise for them to step back and survey the landscape; Republicans may not have produced the most desirable funding bill to ever hit the hopper, but the Speaker’s office has rightfully laid claim to key provisions that actually work in favor of conservative policies. Incrementalism may be frustrating, but I’m not necessarily willing to flush an appropriations bill that actually (finally, miraculously) moves the ball down the field simply because it doesn’t contain provisions to address and put to rest every issue that Harry Reid has refused to let the Congress address.
You will be able to watch the vote here, when it finally happens.
Here we go, people. It’s officially on.
Update:
The House is voting! I repeat, the House is voting!
Yeas have a comfortably thin 20 vote lead, but we wouldn’t have had to sit here until 9:15 if this were an easy get for the Whip.
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