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Dec. 15, 2011 – 11:17 p.m.

Deal Reached on Spending Bill

By Kerry Young, CQ Staff

Congress may clear a final fiscal 2012 spending package as early as Friday, narrowly making a pressing deadline to replenish appropriations for most of the federal government.

Appropriators were on track Thursday night to complete a nine-bill “megabus” that would provide $915 billion to cover a wide range of government activities, including defense, education, environmental regulation, medical research and water projects.

The bipartisan compromise measure, which has been hammered out over the past month, is embodied in a conference agreement on the fiscal 2012 Military Construction-Veterans Affairs bill (HR 2055), with eight other bills attached.

The agreement had largely been settled by Dec. 12. But concerns on the part of Democrats that Republicans might not cut a deal on extending an expiring Social Security payroll tax cut (HR 3630) led to a delay in signing the conference agreement.

With the intent of pressuring Senate Democrats into advancing the conference agreement, the House Appropriations Committee filed a new bill (HR 3671) early Thursday that was said to contain essentially the same text as the conference agreement.

House Democrats were unlikely to vote for the new bill, however, and there was no certainty that House Republicans would provide enough votes for passage.

Later in the day Thursday, lawmakers revisited the idea of returning to the conference agreement as the way to move the year’s unfinished appropriations.

By then, Senate leaders from both parties were making progress on a payroll tax agreement, and that appeared to break the appropriations logjam.

Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, said about 8 p.m. Thursday that he had signed the conference agreement and that he hoped his chamber might clear the spending bill for the president’s signature as early as Friday. There appeared to be no provisions in the bill that would compel a veto.

The House is expected to adopt the conference agreement Friday, with a large number of Democrats voting “yes.”

House Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky., said he, too, thought the measure might be cleared Friday. “In spite of many unnecessary obstacles, it is good to see that responsible leadership and good governance can triumph,” Rogers said.

Gambling on Passage

House leaders had gambled that Congress would clear the final fiscal 2012 measure before agencies and departments began to shut down their operations for lack of money.

Deal Reached on Spending Bill

A continuing resolution (PL 112-55) that has kept the government operating expires Friday, and House leaders ignored calls from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the White House to prepare a short-term stopgap CR to prevent a shutdown.

Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., separately said Thursday morning that they wanted to see Congress clear the conference report quickly and that they did not want to resort to a short-term CR.

Pelosi said earlier negotiations among appropriators had weeded out some “horrific” items proposed by Republicans but that Democrats were not ready to endorse the spending package.

The contents of the conference agreement had been largely kept under wraps since it was mostly finished. But when the House Rules Committee unveiled the new nine-bill package early Thursday, rank-and-file lawmakers and the public were able to get a glimpse of its details.

The conference agreement on HR 2055 apparently will be accompanied by a separate measure (HR 3672) that would provide $8.6 billion in disaster aid financing. A third measure (H Con Res 94) would impose an across-the-board cut in the large spending package to offset the cost of the disaster aid. Although the Senate is likely to pass the disaster aid measure, it is not expected to adopt the offsetting cuts.

Last-Minute Negotiations

Reid and other Democrats had insisted all week that several issues in the conference agreement had remained unresolved.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, ranking Democrat on the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Subcommittee, said members of her party had successfully resisted many GOP bids to shape policy through the spending package. These included attempts to change labor and health law.

“It was a long, hard slog, but it was worth it,” DeLauro said.

Among the unresolved issues were provisions involving abortions in the District of Columbia financed by locally collected tax dollars and travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens who have family on the island.

The conference agreement appeared to have preserved current law restrictions on locally financed abortions in the District of Columbia. But the limit on Cuba travel was dropped.

The House Appropriations Committee in June had adopted an amendment from Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., that would have reimposed travel restrictions from the George W. Bush administration.

Cuban-Americans were allowed only one trip every three years to visit with family and could send no more than $1,200 a year in remittances. Obama had lifted the limit on travel, and the cap on remittances was raised to $2,000 a year.

Deal Reached on Spending Bill

José E. Serrano of New York, a senior Democratic appropriator, had long argued that these restrictions were unfair. After prevailing in a quest to have the House language stripped out, Serrano signed the conference agreement Thursday.

Paul M. Krawzak and Alan K. Ota contributed to this story.

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