Senate Passes Rescission Bill, But Only After Addind Spending Back In That May Make the House Balk

It moves forward, but the House still needs to vote for the Senate's new spending, because the Senate refused to pass the rescissions as the House voted on.

The rescission bill slashes nearly $8 billion from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and over $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds NPR and PBS. Senate Majority Leader John Thune credited Trump's Department of Government Efficiency for identifying "wasteful spending" and called the bill "a small but important step toward fiscal sanity." Just two Republicans--Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine--joined all Democrats in voting against the measure, which is slightly smaller than the House version after a carveout preserved funding for global HIV/AIDS programs.

These "conservative Republicans" sure like spending taxpayer money on pet projects.

Vance had to take a tiebreaking vote on a procedural hurdle when Mitch McConnell joined Collins and Murkowski to block the package. (McConnell voted to pass the final bill, however.) During the lengthy debate, Senate Republicans had to rewrite portions of the bill to curry votes from their own caucus, restoring some funding to PEPFAR (a good choice), shifting climate-change funds to Native American radio stations in the Dakotas (a better use, anyway), and some ag supports related to aid programs but more for the benefit of farmers (YMMV). Those and other marginal changes were enough to get the bill to the 51-48 finale.

However, that means that the bill has to go back to the lower chamber now for passage on a short time schedule. The House barely passed its own version of this bill a month ago, 214/212. Four Republicans voted against the bill at that time, a margin that Mike Johnson can't afford this time around.

House members complained about the Senate changing the bill and adding spending back in. They said they had broken arms to get the thing passed by the slightest of margins, and that there was no guarantee at all that it would pass again when interfered with by big-spending liberal Senate Republicans.

The bill has to be passed by the House by midnight tonight according to the rules, or it fails. Then I guess we'd have to go through the whole process again.

posted by Ace at 12:18 PM

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