In a surprise outcome, the House overwhelmingly approved a year-end $1.1 trillion spending package that avoids a government shutdown and funds federal agencies through next fall.
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The House on Thursday easily passed the $620 billion tax cut package, and the Senate hopes to clear Friday and send to President Barack Obama for his signature.
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Wearing handcuffs and beige T-shirt, Marquez appeared in federal court in Riverside, California for a brief hearing on Thursday. Apparently it was a marriage of convenience , and a sham in order to get the woman in question American citizenship.
The Senate soon after passed both parts of the agreement on a 65 to 33 vote.
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With the votes, lawmakers wrapped up a surprisingly productive, bipartisan burst of late-session legislation.
President Obama is expected to sign the deal into law. Highway and transit spending has soared 48 percent over the past 10 years, creating a giant gap in the highway trust fund. The GOP solution to the problem: increase spending even more over the next five years, including spending on wasteful transit, and then use budget gimmicks to pretend to pay for it. The bill also allows for a two-year pause in the so-called Cadillac Tax on high-end employer health plans, lifts the 40-year-old oil-export ban and provides funds for first responders in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 – a cause that brought former “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart to the Hill in recent weeks.
Their opposition puts them at odds with the White House, which on Wednesday announced its support for the tax bill as well as the spending bill.
“We inherited a process, a cake that was pretty much more than half-baked”, Ryan said Thursday.
“The American people have been demanding that we defund ObamaCare, executive amnesty, the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, Planned Parenthood, WOTUS, the Iran nuclear deal, the refugee resettlement process, climate change, and strike out any expansion of H-2B visas”, King said. But she cited successes in driving away most Republican policy proposals from the measure. For Rep. Erik Paulsen, an ally of Speaker Paul Ryan, the package wasn’t flawless, but it was good enough.
“Finally, with this tax bill, families and businesses are going to have the long-term certainty that they need instead of scrambling year after year to find out what’s next”, declared House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
And in what appeared like a warning to Ryan and his party, Pelosi said, “They have the majority”.
Twenty-six Republicans voted against the Senate bill along with six Democrats and Independent Sen.
In the Senate, Armed Services Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., was a notable “nay” because appropriators overrode a Russian rocket engine ban his committee included in the 2016 defense policy bill – and because of the bill’s “wasteful, unnecessary and inappropriate pork-barrel projects”. Republicans trumpeted “pro-life and pro-Second Amendment protections” they were able to get into the legislation, while Democrats hailed their efforts to stop Republicans from rolling back protections on the environment and Dodd-Frank banking regulations. Sen.
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Beyond that, the Minnesota renewable energy sector will be pleased that tax credits for wind and solar power industries have been extended. It will also suspend the medical device tax in the Affordable Care Act for two years – something Minnesota politicians have been pushing for years.
