Budget bill GOP seeks curbs to environmental agenda

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Congressional Republicans are pressing for an end to the four-decade ban on exporting crude oil and further curbs on President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda as part of a sweeping $1.1 trillion spending bill.

Days from a Friday midnight deadline, progress has proven elusive for negotiators who also are trying to hammer out a separate measure to renew dozens of expired tax breaks. The two bills are the major items of unfinished business for this session of Congress.

“We’ve come to a standstill,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, who blamed the tax bill for the logjam.

While the GOP is seeking concessions from the Obama administration and Democrats on the environment, Republicans have dropped demands to cut off federal funds for Planned Parenthood and for implementing Obama’s marquee health care law.

The spending bill would fill out the details of the October budget deal and fund the day-to-day operating budgets of every Cabinet agency, averting a partial government shutdown. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Monday that Congress may miss the deadline to complete the bill and renew a growing package of tax breaks for both businesses and individuals.

Ryan’s top lieutenant, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said lawmakers may have to work into the weekend, which likely would require a short-term funding bill to avoid a government shutdown at midnight Friday, though the White House indicated Monday that Obama won’t sign such legislation unless a long-term bill is in sight.

The spending and tax bills’ fates have become intertwined as part of a single negotiation among top leaders such as Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and top Democrats Harry Reid of Nevada and Nancy Pelosi of California.

The tax measure would renew dozens of tax breaks that typically are renewed only a year or two at a time. This year, both sides are working to make some of them permanent, which is proving tricky to do. Democrats hope to use repeal of the oil export ban as a bargaining chip, congressional aides said.

Most of the spending items in the so-called omnibus appropriations bills have been worked out, but numerous difficult policy provisions remain, including a GOP bid to block new emissions rules for power plants and an effort to restrict Obama’s ability to declare national monuments in his final year in office.

Pelosi warned in a letter to fellow Democrats that the tax breaks package may be getting too large and that many of the policy “riders” are unacceptable if GOP leaders are going to win Democratic votes.

The question of pausing the processing of Syrian and Iraqi refugees after last month attacks in Paris was part of the talks, though much of the focus was on a bipartisan effort to tighten a program allowing millions of foreigners to enter the U.S. without a visa.