House and Senate Approve $1.8 Trillion Spending Bill

Brushing aside concerns about deepening the budget deficit, U.S. lawmakers approved $1.8 trillion worth of federal spending and tax breaks on Friday in a rare case of bipartisan action after years of damaging fiscal fights in Congress.

The Senate voted 65-33 to approve sweeping legislation that averted a government shutdown, locked in billions of dollars of tax breaks and scrapped a 40-year-old ban on the export of U.S. oil.

Negotiations on Capitol Hill were mostly free of the acrimony that has blighted similar talks for the past five years and forced lawmakers to produce a succession of stopgap measures just to keep the government running.

"I think the system worked" this time, said President Barack Obama, who will now sign the bill into law.

It was a win for new House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, who managed to keep fiscal hawks in his Republican caucus under control during weeks of talks and avoid the kind of infighting that plagued his predecessor, John Boehner.

Obama gave Ryan's efforts a nod during a White House news conference....

Originally posted by Huskerpatriot:
Has a sitting speaker of the house ever been defeated in a primary?

Outside the Beltway, the right is livid with new Speaker Paul Ryan’s trillion-dollar spending deal with Democrats.

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter says Ryan, just seven weeks on the job, is ripe for a primary challenge. “Paul Ryan Betrays America,” blared a headline on the conservative site Breibart.com. And Twitter is littered with references to the Wisconsin Republican’s new “Muslim beard.”

Ryan is refusing to let the attacks go unanswered and is using his megaphone as the nation’s top elected Republican to try to drown out the chorus of conservative critics.

After Congress passed the nearly $2 trillion government funding and tax-cuts package last week, Ryan touted conservative victories in a roundtable with Capitol Hill reporters, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, and again during a trio of interviews with friendly conservative talk radio hosts Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt and his old political mentor, Bill Bennett.

“He will continue to talk directly to conservatives throughout the country as he has always done,” a Ryan aide said.

Ryan has repeatedly stressed that the bipartisan funding agreement lifted the 40-year federal ban on crude oil exports and renewed hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks for U.S. businesses and families.

But in a nod to the critics, Ryan has also emphasized that he “inherited” the flawed omnibus from his predecessor, ousted Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and that the cake was “already baked” by the time he was handed the reins in late October.

Those arguments have done little to sway some of Ryan’s critics, particularly on conservative talk radio....

House Republicans seem a tad defensive about their year-end budget bill as evidenced by their activities over the holiday break, suggesting that they are hearing complaints about the package at home.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who has come under criticism from the far-right over the deal, used Twitter on Sunday to post an interview where he reiterated his distaste for omnibus spending bills and said House Republicans were driven by their concern to make certain the military was funded. He again posted on Twitter a recitation of the “significant number of wins for Republican priorities” in the bill while noting it was a compromise.

The weekend activity of the speaker’s office followed concerted efforts by other top House Republicans to push back against conservative criticism of the deal by highlighting Republican victories, particularly lifting the ban on exports of domestic oil and imposing restrictions on the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service.

While the legislation has been hailed in Washington as evidence that the two parties can work together, it has been assailed by conservative activists who considered it a capitulation to President Obama and congressional Democrats and a sign that little has changed despite the departure of John A. Boehner as speaker. They have been particularly harsh on the measure’s temporary increase in visas for foreign workers and the lack of limits on Planned Parenthood or on refugees from Syria and Iraq.

Republican leaders have also been hurt by repeated Democratic claims of victory on both the spending and policy fronts.

But Mr. Ryan seems to be on solid footing with those who count the most: his House Republican colleagues. Most of them voted for the bill and the conservatives who did not are giving the new speaker a pass, essentially saying he was playing out Mr. Boehner’s hand. Mr. Ryan has a much higher standing in the conservative movement than Mr. Boehner ever did, but he will not be able to keep the critics at bay indefinitely if he cannot show them he plans to do things differently in 2016.