With the bill still incomplete, Congress planned to pass legislation averting a Saturday government shutdown, keeping agencies open through next Wednesday. House members are expected to do the same hours before the deadline. And the White House says the president will sign it, which would avert any agencies shutting down.
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As a procedural move, a number of lawmakers – chiefly from California’s delegation – attempted no less than five times to adjourn the House with Rep. Mike Thompson telling the LA Times there’s no point in the House being in session if it won’t vote on issues Americans care about. “Given that this is the third go-around, I think people have really lost any faith that they’ll come to a rational agreement or resolution in any short amount of time”.
“We’ve got what I believe will be a do-able budget”, Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson County, said. “Everything will be alright”. “Fine, I’m going to go out and do it the way I’ve always done it, ‘” Meadows told reporters.
“We’re not going to let a deadline be our enemy in this”. Democrats are treated well, but we are too. “We can stay in session all the way through Christmas”. “Make sure about that”. Though lawmakers had hoped to reach an agreement on policy details of the full-year spending bill by Friday, both Democrats and Republicans were willing to spend a few more days in Washington next week in the hopes of wearing down their opponents across the aisle.
“It’s in their court, if they accept our offer, we can do it this afternoon”, she said. Nevertheless, the Republican-controlled legislature and the Democratic governor Tom Wolf have been locked in a 5 month long stalemate over taxes and expenditure with no apparent end in sight.
“With 30,000 gun deaths every year, America is in the middle of a public health epidemic”, Pelosi said.
Democrats are instead pushing to include their own priorities, including lifting a ban on federal gun violence research. But the price tag could balloon to $700 billion or more as Democrats seek to make permanent some expiring tax cuts for families with lower incomes, younger children and college students; Republicans were seeking to extend expiring business tax breaks worth many billions.
Rep. Jim Jordan, the chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, wants to require the secretary of Homeland Security to certify all refugees from Syria and Iraq don’t present a security threat.
Rep. Gene DiGirolamo, R-Bucks County, one of two “no” votes for the GOP’s June budget bill, voted for the latest plan Tuesday, saying it set the stage for a spending compromise between the two chambers.
Beyond resisting new GOP provisions, Democrats on Thursday said they would also push to reverse a long-standing ban on certain gun-related research in the spending bill.
“We’re up against the wall”, Superintendent Mark Ferrara said.
“There are a lot of movable parts here”.
Another witness, Chris Kitseff, a gun show dealer from Arizona said it is “disheartening” to witness a potential customer fail a background check in the booth of a dealer and then walk over to an individual seller who is not required to check the Federal Bureau of Investigation database before making a sale.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said negotiators were down to about 40 riders after starting with 202.
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Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Missouri, acknowledged that while the negotiations are tough, the atmosphere in the Capitol is not as intense as in past years.
