A $1 trillion spending bill rushing through Congress this week would send extra money to Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control to fight Ebola and provide a small boost to the Savannah Port dredging project.
But pressures from the left and the right are peeling off support, and the package’s passage is in doubt ahead of Thursday’s deadline to avoid a government shutdown — though both chambers are expected to pass a small bill to keep the government open for a couple of days and provide breathing room.
The 1,600-page bill and 1,000-plus pages of addenda were released to the public late Tuesday after months of negotiations.
The CDC’s regular funding is mostly flat, but it gets an extra $1.77 billion in “emergency” money to fight Ebola, as President Barack Obama got most of his funding request.
The Savannah Port project gets the paltry $1.52 million that Obama requested earlier this year, though the money is moved into a construction account and Congress admonishes the administration’s “inexplicable, unjustifiable, and unnecessarily confusing” decision to wait until lawmakers passed a water resources bill to allow work to begin with state money. Port backers hope for big federal money in 2015.
The bill would fund almost the entire government through September. The one exception: the Department of Homeland Security, which would run out of money Feb. 27.
By then, Republicans will control the Senate and the House and will come up with a way to use the agency’s funding as leverage to strike against Obama’s decision last month to grant legal status for up to 5 million immigrants living illegally in the U.S.
But many activists are demanding Republicans hold the line now.
Tea party leaders staged a protest Wednesday at Republican U.S. Rep. Rob Woodall’s Lawrenceville office urging him to vote no because “it gives the money the president needs to get his amnesty program going,” according to an email from Gwinnett County tea party leader David Hancock.
But Woodall pointed to House Republican appropriators' finding that they were powerless in this case because Obama is running the immigration program through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — which is funded by the fees it collects, not appropriations.
“There is a misconception that if the government shuts down, it takes away his right to do that; it doesn’t,” Woodall said of the president’s executive action on immigration. “We have to affirmatively pass a bill that the president signs in order to change the way that he uses those fees.
“And what we have done in this (spending bill) is narrow the pool of all of the things that you discuss in funding the entire government to just this one section. It’s the best ground on which we can fight.”
U.S. Rep. Tom Price, a Roswell Republican who helped come up with the idea of funding most of the government through the fiscal year but part of it short-term, said House Speaker John Boehner promised House Republicans “everything’s on the table, and he’s intent on making sure the president is held to account. And that includes the potential for going to the courts. What we need is a more willing partner on the other side of the Capitol, and that more willing partner arrives on Jan. 6.”
While the bill included some victories for Democrats, such as a 1 percent pay increase for federal employees and more money for Pell Grants, there were other provisions that sparked ire. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other key Democrats opposed changes to a 2010 finance law loosening restrictions on derivatives trading — a change big banks had lobbied hard to see passed.
U.S. Rep. David Scott, an Atlanta Democrat, said he was unsure how he was going to vote because he needed to review the derivatives language.
His fellow Atlanta Democrat, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, was a firm no: “It’s not a good bill.”
Democrats also objected to curbs on the Environmental Protection Agency and campaign finance changes allowing donors to give up to $324,000 per year — 10 times more than current law — to political parties.
Left-leaning groups such as People for the American Way and the AFL-CIO labor union coalition, along with conservative pressure groups such as Heritage Action for America and the Club For Growth, all urged “no” votes.
U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, an Athens Republican, opposed the bill well before the groups weighed in, as he remains a burr in Republican leaders’ saddle in his final days in Congress.
“I can’t vote for the” spending bill, Broun said. “It’s a tremendous compilation of bigger government, more intrusion in people’s lives, creating more debt, depriving people of their freedom and liberty.”
U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a Coweta County Republican, said he was in favor, and U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Savannah Republican, said he is leaning toward yes.
Members such as U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, a Gainesville Republican, face difficult choices. Collins, finishing his freshman term, is a conservative who sometimes breaks to the right against party leaders but bucked the pressure groups to vote for an omnibus spending bill in January.
Collins said Tuesday that he was still working through the decision. Among the pros: restrictions on what the EPA can declare as federally regulated waterways.
But there were cons as well.
“It’s certainly not everything I would like to see,” Collins said. “But at this point of time, we have to face some of the realities of the numbers in the Senate and the House. And that will be what we look at over the next 24 hours.”
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