Congressional Democrats take a stand with spending bill
Congressional Democrats took a stand Thursday that ultimately failed but that will nevertheless reverberate next year both inside the Capitol and on the presidential campaign trail.
The populist anti-Wall Street faction, increasingly embodied by freshman Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), nearly took down a bill to fund the federal government in a revolt over a provision that would ease restrictions on risky trades by big banks.
For the Warren wing, what they see as siding with banks over average Americans is among the most unforgivable of sins, and the showdown exposed just how disruptive and demanding this populist bloc plans to be.
A vote for this bill is a vote for future taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street, Warren said in a 10-minute speech Thursday blasting the bill. When the next bailout comes, a lot of people will look back to this vote to see who was responsible.
On the other side of the new Democratic divide are a number of longtime power brokers on the Hill, including Sen. Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (Md.), who have held key positions in Washington since at least the Clinton administration. Operating in what they viewed as a pragmatic manner, they hoped to leverage the best deal possible in their final days with a Senate majority.
A $1 trillion spending bill unveiled Tuesday keeps most of the federal government funded through September. Here, The Post's Ed O'Keefe points out a few of the most notable components of the legislation. (Davin Coburn/The Washington Post)
They saw the more than $1trillion deal as a bipartisan compromise a term that has gone out of fashion in Washington necessary to fund the government and preserve money for key liberal programs. They prodded President Obama and his top advisers into waging a last-ditch lobbying effort to save the deal. And they argued that the alternative, letting an all-Republican Congress write new spending bills next year, would be far worse than this bipartisan package.
I think the progressives within the Senate Democratic caucus are feeling they have to speak up, said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a 32-year veteran of Congress. Most of those who are vocal and active have never been in the minority. I listen to them and I think, Theyre not aware that this place is going to change a lot in just a few weeks.
Yet, in a sign of the growing clout of the Warren faction, Durbin declined to say in advance how he would vote on the 1,600-page legislation if the House was able to approve it, a surprising neutral position for a longtime member of the Appropriations Committee that co-wrote the plan.
With the Houses narrow approval of the bill, the fight now heads to Warrens home turf in the Senate, where she will have a day or two to rally support against it. Her challenge will be steep, with a large bloc of Democrats and Republicans poised to support the legislation. Its unclear whether Warren would support a filibuster.
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Congressional Democrats take a stand with spending bill