Late Thursday, the House voted to approve the $1.1 trillion “cromnibus” spending bill to keep most of the federal government open over the vehement opposition of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
Although she was on the losing side, Pelosi made it clear that “she’s tired of being forced to carry the water” for the White House and Senate Democrats who are making deals without her,
according to The Washington Post.
At the end of a three-hour-long meeting Thursday night, Pelosi told her colleagues that “I’m giving you the leverage to do whatever you have to do,” adding that House Democrats “have enough votes to show them never to do this again.”
Earlier in the day, Pelosi said in a House floor speech that she was “enormously disappointed” that the White House thinks that “the only way they can get a bill is to go along with” House Republicans in winning passage of the omnibus measure.
“We are being blackmailed, being blackmailed, to vote for an appropriations bill,” Pelosi declared,
according to Politico.
Liberal Democrats’ fury over the bill focused on its inclusion of measures easing regulations on corporate derivative trading and substantially expanding the amount of money that individuals could contribute to national parties. The anger was so great that White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was dispatched to Capitol Hill Thursday night to plead with House Democrats to vote for the bill.
Pelosi and Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also attacked the inclusion of the derivative provision in the omnibus measure, lost their effort to defeat the spending bill.
But they may have won a tactical victory that puts them in a stronger position next year by sending a message to President Obama that “nothing can get done (or at least nothing can get done easily) without some portion of liberal Democrats on board,” the Post opined.
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