The Senate has scheduled a vote on a CR to reopen the government for Monday at noon. The CR will reportedly be the same as the previous CR, funding CHIP and eliminating the Cadillac tax, but it will not address DACA or Dreamers. To clarify, negotiations remain ongoing, and this is not a deal. Rather, it is the same bill passed by the House that failed to gain cloture in the Senate with a different date — February 9 vs. February 16.
Stay tuned.
After the House passage of the four-week CR, the Senate then voted to begin deliberations. However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appears to lack the 60 votes required to send the CR to President Trump for his signature. There are 51 Republican Senators and several Republican Senators have announced they would not vote for the House-passed measure.
House and Senate Democrats are largely united in opposing the measure, partly out of frustration with the failure of congressional leaders to reach a bipartisan deal that would raise spending caps for the current fiscal year and offer a legislative fix to protect immigrant “Dreamers” from deportation.
Totaling $81 billion, the supplemental spending bill (HR 4667) released Monday evening is $37 billion more than the $44 billion the Trump Administration requested in mid-November. As supplemental appropriations, the money is designated as emergency spending, which does not require offsets under congressional budget rules. The White House included a list of offsets, which can be found here.
If approved as is, this latest disaster aid bill would bring the emergency spending total to $132.75 billion this year — significantly surpassing the $60 billion spent in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and the $120 billion appropriated after Hurricane Katrina.
The bill includes:
The bill includes language that would allow individuals who have lost property to wildfires to deduct damage costs on their taxes, would remove the penalty for withdrawing money from a retirement account and would incentivize donations to people and regions rebuilding after wildfires.
House leadership has not yet announced whether the supplemental aid package will be added to the stopgap spending bill (H J Res 124) heading to the House Rules Committee on today and the House floor after that.
Current stopgap funding expires Dec. 22.
Earlier this afternoon, the House passed H.R. 1, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, by a vote of 227 to 205. A total of 13 Republicans joined every Democrat in opposing the bill.
Even as the House was considering its bill on the floor, the Senate Finance Committee has been debating its version of the measure since Monday. Late on Tuesday, the committee leadership decided to add a provision that would repeal the individual insurance mandate currently in law as part of the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) announced his opposition to the bill yesterday, making the Republican leadership’s current vote margin on the bill even smaller.
The goal of the proponents of this effort is to get a bill signed into law by the holidays.
The House Republican Leadership unveiled their much-awaited Tax Cuts and American Jobs act.
At first glance, the measure would:
The charitable deduction will not change, and the tax provisions related to 401(k)s are unchanged.
A section-by-section of the measure is here.
Federal Relations is still going thought the measure and will continue to provide updates.