Republican Representative Hal Rogers, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee that is in charge of writing spending bills, said private negotiations on the large package were inching forward, but, “We’re not close to a TD”, using the abbreviation for the American football term “touchdown”. “Why would we not want information?” she said.
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But House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, D-Wis., declined to commit to meeting the new deadline of Wednesday.
Democrats believe time is on their side, because Mr. Ryan, like former Speaker John A. Boehner, can not rely on his majority Republicans to pass the spending bill.
But both chambers still will have to pass a massive government spending bill next week, before they leave town for a long holiday recess.
The House will vote on this stop-gap measure on Friday.
Instead, both the governor and lawmakers went their own way and staked out positions on which they stood firm long after the budget deadline passed.
The Pennsylvania Senate advanced legislation Thursday supported by Gov. Tom Wolf to break state government control over wine sales, but its fate was uncertain in the House, where majority Republicans have demanded that a stronger privatization measure be a companion to a bipartisan budget deal.
The House on Tuesday passed a $30.3 billion spending plan vastly different from the $30.8 billion measure already approved by the Senate with the governor’s blessing.
The victims in attendance, which included family members of those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, happen to be on Capitol Hill while lawmakers are negotiating a major budget deal to fund the federal government for 2016.
Voting along party lines by 242 to 173, the House blocked the effort by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to bring to the floor a bill that would allow the government to ban suspected terrorists from legally purchasing guns. “We know as Republicans what we think we want in it. We know know basically some of the things the Democrats may very well want in it”, Rounds says.
“The way that we will be able to finally reach an agreement here is when Republicans abandon their insistence on including these kinds of ideological riders in the budget process”, said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. “We’re in negotiation so I have a great natural hesitancy to talk about it”, Hatch told reporters afterwards.
Making those and the other tax breaks permanent would be a sweeping compromise, a almost $700 billion undertaking that appears increasingly hard.
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