Senate finishes spending bill, averting shutdown

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Senate on Saturday gave final congressional approval to a $1 trillion bill financing the Pentagon and scores of other federal agencies through next September. The action avoided a shuttering of government offices that otherwise would have occurred this weekend when temporary financing expired.

The vote was 67-32. The action set up a House vote Monday on the legislation.

The Senate also voted to temporarily avert a Jan. 1 payroll tax increase and benefit cutoff for the longtime unemployed Americans, but forcing a reluctant President Barack Obama to make an election-year choice over whether to build an oil pipeline through the heart of the country.

With the still-reeling economy serving as a backdrop, the Senate’s 89-10 vote belied a tortuous battle between Democrats and Republicans that produced the compromise two-month extension of the expiring tax breaks and jobless benefits and forestalled cuts in doctors’ Medicare reimbursements.

It also capped a year of divided government marked by raucous partisan fights that tumbled to the brink of a first-ever U.S. default and three federal shutdowns, only to see eleventh-hour deals emerge. It ensured that the two sides would revisit the payroll tax cut early next year as the fights for control of the White House and Congress heat up.

The Senate adjourned for the year after its votes Saturday.

The tax legislation delivers tax cuts and jobless benefits that some Republicans opposed. It also represents a rebuff of Obama’s original demands for a yearlong payroll tax reduction for 160 million workers that was to be even deeper than this year’s cut, extended to employers and paid for by boosting taxes on the highest-earning Americans.

The measure’s $33 billion price tag will be paid for instead by raising fees that government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will charge to back new mortgages or refinancings, beginning next year. When fully phased in, those increases could cost a person with a $200,000 mortgage about $17 a month.

Despite the changes, Obama praised the Senate for passing the bill and prodded the Republican-run House to give it final approval in a vote expected early next week. He exhorted lawmakers to extend the tax cuts and jobless aid for the entire year, saying it would be “inexcusable” not to.

“It should be a formality, and hopefully it’s done with as little drama as possible when they get back in January” from their holiday recess, he said.

Senate Republicans voted 39-7 in favor of the payroll tax measure, suggesting that many House Republican lawmakers might also back it. Of the 51 Senate Democrats and two independents who usually side with them, only three voted “no.”

While Obama and Democrats used the fight to portray themselves as defenders of beleaguered middle- and lower-income people, Republicans used it to cast themselves as champions of job creation.

Headlining that was a provision they inserted forcing Obama to make a decision within two months on whether to allow construction of the proposed 1,700-mile (2,700-kilometer) Keystone XL pipeline, which is to deliver up to 700,000 barrels of oil daily from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Texas.

The language requires him to issue the needed permit unless he declares the pipeline would not serve the national interest.

Unions have clamored for the thousands of jobs the project could create. Environmentalists have decried the huge amounts of energy it would take to extract the oil.

Obama originally announced he was delaying a decision until 2013, which would have allowed him to avoid choosing between two Democratic constituencies before Election Day next November.
An administration official said Friday that Obama would almost surely refuse to grant the permit, a stance echoed Saturday by congressional Democrats.