House Approves Temporary Spending Bill, Averting Shutdown

Congress is sending legislation to President Barack Obama that would head off the threat of a government shutdown at midnight Wednesday.

Democrats helped embattled House GOP leaders pass the measure by a sweeping 277-151 vote with just hours to spare. The Senate passed the legislation by a 78-20 tally earlier in the day.

Approval of such stopgap measures used to be routine, but debate this year was delayed by tea party lawmakers who demanded that the must-pass bill be used to punish Planned Parenthood, stripping it of federal money because of its practice of supplying tissue from aborted fetuses for scientific research.

The bill provides 10 weeks to negotiate a more wide-ranging budget deal that would carry past the 2016 presidential election.

Many of the conservative GOP lawmakers who helped bring House Speaker John Boehner down want to preserve stringent "caps" on the spending bills Congress passes every year. But Senate Republicans are generally more eager to rework the 2011 budget deal that put them in place.

Boehner's surprise resignation announcement on Friday followed unrest by archconservatives in his conference who wanted to use the pending stopgap spending bill to try to force Democrats and Obama to take federal funding away from Planned Parenthood.

Instead, Boehner and McConnell opted for the pragmatic route — a bipartisan measure that steers clear of the furor over Planned Parenthood and avoids the risk of a partial government shutdown — over the opposition of the most hardline conservative Republicans.

Republicans have long targeted Planned Parenthood, and the group's top official appeared before a House panel on Tuesday to defend it in the wake of videos released this summer concerning its practices in providing fetal tissue for scientific research.

Republicans say the videos, made by abortion foes posing as private purchasers, show Planned Parenthood has broken federal laws including a ban on for-profit fetal tissue sales. The organization says it has acted legally and the videos were deceitfully edited.

Last week, Democrats led a filibuster of a Senate stopgap measure that would have blocked money to Planned Parenthood. Eight Republicans did not support that measure, leaving it short of a simple majority, much less the 60 votes required to overcome the filibuster. After last week's vote failed, McConnell on Monday orchestrated a bipartisan 77-19 vote on a funding bill — stripped of the Planned Parenthood provision — to force a final vote.

"This bill hardly represents my preferred method for funding the government, but it's now the most viable way forward after Democrats' extreme actions forced our country into this situation," McConnell said Tuesday of the stopgap measure.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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