House passes bill to prevent government shutdown

[question everything]

Source: AP

The House on Friday passed legislation to head off a government shutdown next week by temporarily extending spending on most federal programs at current levels — but at the same time boosted the office budgets of lawmakers by more than 8 percent.

The House passed the measure by a 217-190 vote. It would keep the government running for another month and also patches over problems in the financially struggling Postal Service and funds soon-to-expire highway programs for another month as well.

But in an unusual step, those measure were tacked onto a $4.7 billion House-Senate compromise bill that will fund Congress' own budget. That measure was chosen because it can't be amended before being presented to President Barack Obama, which saves time — and spares Democrats politically difficult votes on both the House and Senate floors. The one-month stopgap spending measure is needed because Congress has failed to complete work on any of the 12 annual spending bills for agency budgets that it passes each year.

It's not unusual for Congress to tack such stopgap bills onto other spending bills to speed them along. But by choosing the legislative branch funding bill to be the first measure presented to the president, majority Democrats opened themselves to GOP criticism that they were putting their own budget ahead of agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security.


Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090925/ap_on_go_co/us_congress_spending

[sabbat hunter]

1. it is bad that

they boosted their own budgets by 9% in hard times.

[Cleita]

2. Yes, considering there supposedly is no inflation index to support

additional funding. We seniors are not going to get a raise in our Social Security for that reason, no inflation.

[joeglow3]

3. There was negative inflation, why an 8% increase?

[question everything]

4. A good question to ask our representatives (nt)