Averting crisis, Congress clears stopgap bill, $1.1B to fight Zika

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Averting an election-year crisis, Congress late Wednesday sent President Barack Obama a bill to keep the government operating through Dec. 9 and provide $1.1 billion in long-delayed funding to battle the Zika virus.

The House cleared the measure by a 342-85 vote just hours after a bipartisan Senate tally. The votes came after top congressional leaders broke through a stalemate over aid to help Flint, Mich., address its water crisis. Democratic advocates for Flint are satisfied with renewed guarantees that Flint will get funding later this year to help rid its water system of lead.

The hybrid spending measure was Capitol Hill’s last major to-do item before the election and its completion allows lawmakers to jet home to campaign to save their jobs. Congress won’t return to Washington until the week after Election Day for what promises to be a difficult lame-duck session.

The bill caps months of wrangling over money to fight the mosquito-borne Zika virus. It also includes $500 million for rebuilding assistance to flood-ravaged Louisiana and other states.

The White House said Obama will sign the measure and praised the progress on Flint.

The temporary spending bill sped through the House shortly after the chamber passed a water-projects bill containing the breakthrough compromise on Flint. The move to add the Flint package to the water-projects bill, negotiated by top leaders in both parties and passed Wednesday by a 284-141 vote, was the key to lifting the Democratic blockade on the separate spending bill.

The deal averts a potential federal shutdown and comes just three days before deadline. It defuses a lengthy, frustrating battle over Zika spending. Democrats claimed a partial victory on Flint while the GOP-dominated Louisiana delegation won a down payment on Obama’s $2.6 billion request for their state.

The spending bill also includes full-year funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs. That measure permits veterans with war injuries to receive in vitro fertilization treatments. A longtime ban on such treatments – demanded in the early 1990s by anti-abortion lawmakers concerned about destroyed embryos – has been lifted.

Also Wednesday, Democrats joined with Republicans to hand Obama the first veto override of his presidency, voting overwhelmingly to allow families of Sept. 11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia in U.S. courts for its purported backing of the attackers.

Both the House and Senate voted decisively to reverse Obama’s decision to scuttle the legislation. Lawmakers said their priority wasn’t Saudi Arabia, but the 9/11 victims and their families who continue to demand justice 15 years after attackers killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, the Washington, D.C., area, and Pennsylvania. Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis.