House Passes $1.1 Trillion CR/Omnibus Bill to Partially Fund Federal Government
The House narrowly passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill Thursday night, averting a government shutdown just hours before the midnight deadline — but only after a last-minute revolt from within the Democratic Party nearly sank the deal entirely.
A Bill With a Deliberately Split Purpose
The legislation, quickly nicknamed the “CRomnibus” for combining a full-year omnibus appropriations bill for most federal agencies with a short-term continuing resolution for one specific agency, funds the vast majority of the federal government through the end of the fiscal year next September. The Department of Homeland Security is the notable exception, funded only through late February — a deliberate three-month window Republican leadership built in specifically to preserve leverage for a future fight over President Obama’s recent executive action extending deportation relief to millions of undocumented immigrants, an action conservative members wanted defunded outright but couldn’t secure the votes to actually block.
The bill passed 219 to 206, a genuinely bipartisan and genuinely fractured result: 67 Republicans voted against it, largely because it failed to stop Obama’s immigration order, while 57 Democrats crossed over to support it despite deep reservations about provisions elsewhere in the bill — a rare alignment of House Speaker John Boehner and the Obama White House, both working simultaneously to hold their own parties’ skeptics in line.
The Provision That Nearly Killed It
What actually threatened to sink the bill wasn’t the immigration fight at all, but a provision tucked into its financial regulations section rolling back part of the Dodd-Frank reforms passed after the 2008 financial crisis — specifically, a rule change letting banks move certain high-risk derivatives trading operations under the protection of federal deposit insurance, the same insurance that backs ordinary consumer bank accounts. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren led the charge against the provision, arguing it would let Wall Street “gamble with taxpayer money” while taxpayers absorbed the downside risk if those trades went badly.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi took the fight directly to the floor, delivering an unusually emotional condemnation of her own party leadership’s willingness to accept the provision: “I was so really heartbroken to see the taint that was placed on this valuable appropriations bill from on high,” Pelosi told colleagues, calling the provision “a ransom” and “blackmail” that would ultimately profit Wall Street at taxpayers’ expense. Boehner pushed back directly, insisting the Dodd-Frank rollback reflected “a bipartisan, bicameral agreement,” not a unilateral Republican addition.
A White House Working Against Its Own Party’s Objections
What ultimately saved the bill was an unusual, last-minute alliance: the Obama administration actively lobbied wavering Democrats to set aside their objections to the Dodd-Frank rollback, arguing that rejecting this deal would only produce a considerably worse spending package once the newly elected Republican Senate majority took power the following January, giving the GOP a stronger negotiating position on essentially every provision Democrats found objectionable this time around. That argument — accept an imperfect deal now, or face a worse one in a few weeks — proved persuasive enough to secure the 57 Democratic votes the bill needed to survive the Republican defections over immigration.
A Bill Almost Nobody Loved, and Almost Everybody Needed
The CRomnibus’s final character reflected the deeply unusual coalition that passed it: pieces attacked from the left over Wall Street deregulation and campaign finance rule changes that raised limits on individual political donations, and pieces attacked from the right for failing to block executive action on immigration — a bill, as one contemporary commentator put it, “hated by both the left and the right” precisely because it required both sides to accept provisions they found genuinely objectionable in order to avoid the larger, mutually undesirable alternative of a government shutdown just before the holidays.
For related coverage of congressional budget fights, see our piece on food safety concerns amid the TPA fast-track debate, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.