‘After months of fiscal brinkmanship this budget deal is the first real sprout of bipartisanship and it should break the long cycle of spending crises that have snarled this congress and hampered the middle class, ‘ said Schumer on the Senate floor after his counterpart, majority leader Mitch McConnell, announced the deal.
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The deal would raise the spending caps by about $300 billion over two years, according to a congressional aide.
Schumer and McConnell appear to be working toward a plan that would respond to the House bill with a long-awaited spending pact to give whopping increases both to the Pentagon and domestic programs – nearly $300 billion spread over two years. Afghan war will cost B in 2018 MORE (R-Ky.) has teed up a deal on the budget and a stopgap funding bill, with roughly a day left to prevent a shutdown.
The overhanging reality in the talks about potentially locking in a major agreement this week is Democrats will be needed in both chambers to muscle it to passage.
“I’m confident there’s not going to be a government shutdown, and there shouldn’t be”, Sen.
He said the budget deal was a “genuine breakthrough” after months of legislative logjams.
The borrowing limit will have to be raised in March and addressing it as part of the budget could avoid what otherwise would be a highly partisan fight over the nation’s fiscal needs next month.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was equally optimistic, saying a meeting with McConnell had gone well yesterday and predicted legislation that would raise both defense and domestic spending.
Alongside his own announcement, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reiterated his pledge to hold a vote on legislation to protect almost 700,000 unauthorized immigrants ahead of DACA’s March 5 expiration deadline in a process he said would be “fair to all sides”.
But Ryan did not rush to offer the assurance that Pelosi sought.
President Trump has demanded funding for the border wall be included in any legislation to address a permanent solution for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which expires March 5.
If conservative Republicans in the House oppose the agreement, Ryan would need a significant number of Democratic votes to get it passed.
Senators including Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal expressed guarded optimism Tuesday that a negotiated settlement including a potential path forward for young immigrant Dreamers could be reached before a government shutdown Thursday.
“The Budget Agreement today is so important for our great Military”, he wrote on Twitter. Shaheen’s office did not immediately respond to questions about the budget deal’s opioid funding. He added the bill will have an amendment process that’s “fair to all sides”.
At the White House, President Donald Trump appeared to hold out the possibility of a shutdown if lawmakers don’t come up with a deal on immigration.
“I’d love to see a shutdown if we can’t get this stuff taken care of”, Trump declared Tuesday, repeating the sentiment for emphasis.
“So why can’t we have some sort of commitment on this side?”
The key outlying issue appears to be for how long to hike the debt ceiling, which the United States is expected to hit next month, though the exact parameters were still being negotiated when the deal was announced. Those figures would be slightly increased for the 2019 budget year beginning October 1.
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One can fairly ask why on Earth we’re spending more on increasing the military’s already massive budget than on our catastrophically underfunded infrastructure system, relief for Puerto Rico, or a hundred other pressing policy challenges. That figure is calculated based on how spending levels would have automatically dropped if lawmakers failed to reach a deal to waive so-called “sequestration” – the automatic annual cuts to spending that Congress has partially waived each year since 2012.
