The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a package of spending bills to keep parts of the government open for the rest of the fiscal year.
It passed 339-85, with all five of Colorado’s Democratic House members — Reps. Yadira Caraveo, Jason Crow, Diana DeGette, Joe Neguse and Brittany Pettersen — voting to keep the lights on, as did GOP Rep. Doug Lamborn.
Republican Reps. Lauren Boebert and Ken Buck, both members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, voted against the package. While more Democrats voted for the bill than Republicans, more than half of the GOP caucus, 132 members, supported the government funding measure.
The bill now heads to the Senate, which hopes to get it to President Joe Biden by March 8 to avoid a partial government shutdown.
The $460 billion “minibus” rolls together six spending bills to fund several departments, including Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, Commerce, Justice, Interior, and Energy. It also contained more than 6,000 community or congressionally directed funding projects, also known as earmarks.
All of Colorado's Democrats, as well as Boebert, requested earmarks in this year’s spending bills, getting more than 120 requests totaling over $125 million for Colorado. Republicans Buck and Lamborn did not put in requests for earmarks.
Congress still has to pass another six appropriations bills, those that have been tougher to negotiate, by March 22.
Neither side was completely happy with the final product, but it did contain wins for both sides of the aisle.
Democrats were able to secure more than $1 billion in increased funding for the food program known as WIC. Republicans got cuts to the FBI, ATF and EPA, and some policy wins, such as barring the sale of oil from the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China. They also won a gun rights provision that prevents the VA from reporting veterans who have been deemed incapable of managing their own finances to the FBI’s background check database without a judge’s consent.
Colorado’s Buck has repeatedly voted against CRs and government spending bills in the past citing the growing deficit.
While the bill contained millions in earmarks she requested, Boebert also cited the overall size of the package, which was negotiated last spring as part of the debt ceiling increase, for her no vote, as well as the lack of hard right policy priorities.
She complained the bill “maintains COVID spending levels, funds the Green New Deal, and excludes nearly all conservative policy riders we fought for.”
Boebert posted on social media that no “true conservative” should vote for the minibus. “We have the majority… let’s use it!”
However, Rep. Doug Lamborn celebrated his yes vote in a statement, stating, “while not perfect, this bill saves taxpayers $200 billion without detracting from national security programs or veterans services.”
Republicans have an extremely slim majority in the House and have been wracked by dysfunction for much of the Congress, including failing to achieve their goal of passing 12 individual spending bills. Wednesday’s vote means that the question of government funding — or at least funding for half of the federal government — is off the table until just before the fall election.
In a time of divided government, Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette said the bill is something both sides should be able to live with.
“For the most part the limits are the limits we negotiated last spring and we need to move forward,” she told CPR News. “And also we were able to keep virtually all of the poison amendments out — the restrictions on abortion (and) LGBTQ rights, they’re gone from the bill. I think it’s a compromise.”
