In the best case scenario, Speaker Ryan will need dozens of Democratic votes to pass the funding bill, and Democrats will not support anything containing riders that are nothing more than a Republican policy wish list. “And if we want to offer ideas, then we need to actually have ideas”, Ryan said.
Advertisement
Mr. Ryan, a known budget wonk who reluctantly took over from John Boehner, said House Republicans must put out “specific proposals”, a subtle rebuke of the body’s most conservative wing, where opposition to the White House often trumps everything else.
GOP leaders had delivered the sweeping spending proposal to the Democrats on Tuesday evening as Congress scrambles to fund the government and prevent a shutdown ahead of a looming December 11 deadline.
“Despite the incredible overreaction to this provision”, the bill added only modest requirements to the government’s current screening procedures, Mr. Connolly said.
Multiple GOP aides say Pelosi is overreacting, and that there have been weeks of talks between Republicans and Democrats on the spending panel over which policy items could be acceptable.
Democrats immediately slammed Ryan’s speech and said his plans sound reminiscent of the budget blueprints he developed when he served as chairman of the House Budget Committee.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) said this week that Republicans had initially included more than 250 riders that Democrats had whittled down to about 100 now under debate.
The White House has said the refugee proposal is unworkable and contrary to American values. “The effort that they’re engaged in now is to lard the bill up with ideological riders”.
“It was important to have a tightening of the visa waiver [system]”, Pelosi said.
The measure, which is expected to be voted on in both chambers and sent to President Barack Obama by the end of the week, also restores the Export-Import Bank, whose charter expired earlier this year after several Republicans fought to kill it.
Recent spending bill debates have featured down to the wire spats over defunding Planned Parenthood or Obamacare.
But Earnest warned that if the Republicans go back to a strategy of trying to pass major legislation along strict party lines, theyll see that the process doesnt work.
The bill not only boosts annual spending on highways, bridges and mass transit and papers over troubling funding shortfalls, but also includes a measure that reauthorizes the U.S. Export-Import Bank after a long political feud over the banks fate.
Advertisement
Yet Obama threatened to veto that bill, and in the Senate more limited changes are being considered, leaving any resolution uncertain.
