Senate advances $1.4T spending deal
WASHINGTON • The Senate has voted to advance a $1.4 trillion government spending package in a last, bipartisan burst of legislating before bolting for the holidays from a Capitol that’s toxic with impeachment.
The first bill in the two-bill package, covering domestic programs, passed easily Thursday by a 71-23 vote, with a vote on a Pentagon and homeland security measure to come later in the day.
The legislation gives President Donald Trump a victory on his U.S.-Mexico border fence and gives Democrats long-sought domestic spending increases and a repeal of Obama-era taxes on high-cost health insurance plans. It blends spending increases for both sides — reelection fodder for lawmakers throughout the Capitol — with tax and benefit add-ons that will add roughly $400 billion to the deficit over 10 years.
The compromise bill would forestall a government shutdown this weekend, and the White House has announced Trump will sign it before Friday’s midnight deadline.
The split-their-differences legislation is towing an unusually large haul of unrelated provisions into law, prompting futile protest from fiscal conservatives. It implements a summertime spending deal that reversed unpopular and unworkable automatic spending cuts to defense and domestic programs — at a $2.2 trillion cost over the coming decade.
“These spending bills are a fiscal dumpster fire,” said Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah. “This is embarrassing.”
Key provisions include an expensive repeal of Obama-era taxes on high-cost health plans, help for retired coal miners, and an increase from 18 to 21 in the nationwide legal age to buy tobacco products muscled into the measure by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
The almost 2,400-page package reflects the reality of divided government and the enduring strength of the Capitol’s appropriations process, which allows members to go to bat for their states and congressional districts. McConnell emerged as a victor, winning the politically popular $6 billion pension rescue for about 100,000 retired coal miners, along with more parochial items like help for his state’s legal hemp industry and $410 million to build a new veterans hospital in Louisville.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was also a driving force, winning permanent repeal of a tax on high-cost “Cadillac” health insurance benefits that is unpopular with Democratic labor allies.
McConnell, Pelosi and key deputies such as the veteran, pragmatic chairs of the Appropriations Committee have wrestled over the spending package for months, finally cutting a deal on Monday that gives Trump a steady stream of funding for his long-sought border wall.
“I would have preferred no funding for the wall,” said top Appropriations Committee Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont.





