Thread: Senate Backs Spending Measure to Avert Shutdown

Senate Backs Spending Measure to Avert Shutdown

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN SEPT. 28, 2015

WASHINGTON — After a brief trading of angry recriminations, Senate Republicans and Democrats voted Monday to advance a temporary spending measure that would avert a shutdown of the federal government on Wednesday night but also signals a battle in the weeks ahead.

The measure, which still requires final approval by the Senate and by the House, where some rank-and-file Republicans had pledged to block it, would keep agencies operating roughly at last year’s spending levels through Dec. 11.

The vote was 77 to 19, with 60 votes needed to proceed, and 31 Republicans joined 44 Democrats and two independents in favor.

The bill does not include language cutting off federal financing for Planned Parenthood, a step that many Republicans had demanded while they investigate allegations surrounding the organization’s role in providing aborted fetuses for use in medical research.

It remains uncertain how House Republicans will handle the spending measure, particularly after the unexpected resignation on Friday of Speaker John A. Boehner. Some Congressional aides said they expected that Mr. Boehner would be able to push the bill through with support from Democrats, now that he does not have to worry about political reprisal from the hard-line conservatives in his own party, the same lawmakers who forced a government shutdown in 2013 over the Affordable Care Act.

The bill must be adopted before the fiscal year ends at 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday or many federal agencies will be forced to shut down on Thursday.

Even in the Senate, Republicans expressed grave displeasure at having to adopt the legislation without the Planned Parenthood language. And the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, sharply criticized Democrats for blocking the regular spending bills and forcing a showdown.

Mr. McConnell said that Senate Democrats had stopped all 12 regular appropriations bills “in the hopes of provoking a crisis Democrats might exploit to grow the I.R.S. and the D.C. bureaucracy.” Mr. McConnell expressed particular outrage that Democrats had blocked the military spending measure that would pay for troops serving overseas.

“This leaves the funding legislation before us as the only viable way forward in the short term,” Mr. McConnell said. “It doesn’t represent my first, second, third, or 23rd choice when it comes to funding the government, but it will keep the government open through the fall.”

The Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said it was the Republicans who were to blame for trying to force a government shutdown, and he noted that the Dec. 11 deadline would make for a tense fight over the next few months.

“Though it appears we’ll sidestep a Republican-manufactured crisis this week, the disaster is looming head,” Mr. Reid said.

Congress must still address how to fund the government in the longer term, whether to raise the debt limit and passing a highway bill.

“The measure is really shortsighted,” Mr. Reid said. “Dec. 11 — that means within the coming weeks we will again be negotiating with the Republicans to avoid another shutdown, we’ll also have to find a way to pay our bills.”

Mr. Reid warned about the unpredictability in the Republican-controlled House.

“Last week the Republican House showed that it can depose a speaker,” he said. “I hope they elect some sensible leaders. I’m deeply concerned. Come Nov. 1, we have no idea what House Republicans will do. This is after their election to replace Congressman Boehner. They want to go off the cliff or do they want to wreck the global economy? Maybe both.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/us...-shutdown.html

Does anyone expect anything other than another CR two weeks before Christmas? I thought McConnell said that he know how to govern? Would a republican be less than truthful?

Lets see, what was the source of this trouble again?

Oh yeah, a dishonest video published by a 501 C 3 tax fraud "charity" called falsely "Center for Medical Progress" where the Chairman posed dishonestly as the President of a bogus business organization wanting to buy fetal parts from Planned Parenthood who told told him they don't do that because they aren't middlemen in that business, a video that Carly Fiorina lied about to make a name for herself.

And this is why our Republicans in Congress want to shut down the federal government? On a lie by a liar operating two fraud organizations manifested by a candidate who lied about it in a debate to advance her poll numbers with anti-abortionists?

No due process, no official investigation, just false videos published by proven frauds extolled by a proven liar running for the Republican nomination? Is this the position of our Values Voters concerned about religious liberty, opposed to legal abortion and and legal gay marriage? REALLY?!

Is this what our party has been reduced to? Honestly?! Shutting down the US government over a bogus video?!!

Then: GOD. HELP. US. ALL.

I have no worries at all when talk of these "shutdowns" comes up. Our federal and state governments are so bloated they could be cut in half and probably no one would notice. That includes the military which seems to like to experiment with things that don't work. We're lucky we have some geniuses in research or we would be done.

Still, it's stupid for grown men to be carrying on this way in Congress threatening shutdowns over a bogus video. Is this how they represent the American People? Is this how much they disregard the rule of law? Is this how silly they want most of us to consider them?

Shameful. There are certain things that are worth the threat of a government shutdown, an undesirable war, illegal immigration, lawless executive action, free trade trade treason, NSA spying on Americans, and so much more .... but a bogus video about Planned Parenthood IS NOT ONE OF THEM.

Excerpt:

Federal money still bankrolls abortions

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Planned Parenthood shouldn't get one more dollar of taxpayer support. Not even one more dime.

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Planned Parenthood is in the abortion business. Part of the business model apparently involves selling intact organs from aborted babies. The videos released by the Center for Medical Progress show top Planned Parenthood executives discussing how best to extract fetuses to ensure their organs are suitable for sale.

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It's unclear whether Planned Parenthood's clients realize they've consented to “donate” their unborn children's remains. It's ghastly business in any event.

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The $1.2 billion national organization receives more than $500 million in government funds. Federal dollars are not supposed to subsidize Planned Parenthood's abortions directly. So what? Money is fungible and none of other services Planned Parenthood provides — referrals for breast cancer screenings, pap smears and the like — are not also offered by other, considerably less bloodstained women's health care providers.

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Planned Parenthood's most strident defenders insist the videos are a selectively edited “hoax,” and what the executives are shown discussing is perfectly legal anyway. In fact, the videos are not a hoax — the unedited versions are freely available online. And abortion's partisans cannot defend the morality of negotiating prices for fetal organs, so they're left to mere legalisms and euphemisms such as “fetal tissue.”

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Sorry, but euphemism will not do. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood's senior abortionist shown in the first video, casually describes over a salad and a glass of red wine how she uses an ultrasound to make sure she extracts the baby with its vital — and most marketable — organs in one piece.

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“We've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part, I'm going to basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna see if I can get it all intact,” Nucatola says.

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Heart, lung, liver — not just “tissue.”

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People who are genuinely on the fence need to pay heed to what Planned Parenthood's executives do and say in private, and be skeptical of the spin their <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym></acronym> managers are peddling now. Dead babies shouldn't be commodities to be traded like pork bellies. And taxpayers shouldn't have to boost Planned Parenthood's bottom line.

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—Ben Boychuk

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Ben Boychuk is associate editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Joel Mathis is associate editor for Philadelphia Magazine.

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/201...ON03/150809932

Dead babies shouldn't be commodities to be traded like pork bellies.

Since when? Body parts are traded for the cost of the transfer and expense and profit every day including from dead babies. Do you want to stop hospitals and everyone else from this business of using body parts to save the sick or be used in medical research? Or do you just want to expose yourselves as quacks with an illegal agenda supporting bogus videos published by frauds with no respect for the rule of law? Any time someone is ready to lay down their gauntlet of hypocrisy and shut down all donor programs and cut federal funding from all hospitals, clinics and medical research organizations that use body parts and tissue from dead humans including babies from saving the sick and from medical research to find cures and treatments for the living, please let me know.

It's crazy the way both parties get off the track on these issues that are highly charged but not that representational of a cross section of the membership. I hope that more people see through this baloney but so far it hasn't looked so good.

The evangelical religious movement is sort of a hot potato; they were mostly democrats until about 1979. That was the peak of the baby boom impact and I gather that a lot of people decided that the Dems were just a morally sleazy crowd. I've heard some stories. So then they went republican.

Originally Posted by Captainron

It's crazy the way both parties get off the track on these issues that are highly charged but not that representational of a cross section of the membership. I hope that more people see through this baloney but so far it hasn't looked so good.

The evangelical religious movement is sort of a hot potato; they were mostly democrats until about 1979. That was the peak of the baby boom impact and I gather that a lot of people decided that the Dems were just a morally sleazy crowd. I've heard some stories. So then they went republican.

Yeah, it's the worst thing that ever happened to the Republican Party, because of the divide it caused forcing members of our party to have to choose between protecting civil rights or enacting economic solutions, when before this invasion of religionists, we stood for both.