Six ways Democrats lose out in the 2015 spending bill
The bill guts sweeping laws on banking and campaign
finance, slashes environmental and IRS funding, and rolls back trucking safety
rules
"Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a member of the Senate
Banking Committee, right, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., ranking member of
the House Financial Services Committee, express their outrage to reporters that
a huge, $1.1 trillion spending bill approved by the Republican-controlled House
yesterday contains changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that regulates complex
financial instruments known as derivatives, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2014, on Capitol
Hill in Washington. Democratic support for the omnibus bill funding every
corner of government faded Wednesday as liberal lawmakers erupted over a
provision that weakens the regulation of risky financial instruments and
another that allows more money to flood into political parties.
Late Tuesday
night, congressional negotiators unveiled a spending deal to keep most of the
government funded through September 2015, but on Wednesday it became clear that
the substantial policy concessions made by Democrats in a bid to attract enough
Republican votes to keep the government open are likely to shrink the coalition
supporting the last-minute bill.
The
1,600-page spending document could be forced through the House and Senate in
less than one week, giving lawmakers little time to review its contents but
enough time to be angered that certain controversial provisions were included,
most notably major changes to two of the biggest laws approved by Congress
since 2000, which had rewritten Wall Street rules and reformed the campaign
finance system.
The current
government spending bill expires on Thursday, and failure to pass new
legislation by then will trigger another shutdown a little more than a year
after Republicans forced a 16-day government closure in October 2013. That GOP
standoff over defunding the Democrats’ health care law cost the nation an
estimated $24 billion.
Though the
so-called cromnibus bill funds the majority of the government through an
omnibus package for the rest of the fiscal year, it pays for the Department of
Homeland Security only through February via a stopgap measure known as a
continuing resolution, or CR. Conservatives hope to isolate the department,
which is tasked with implementing President Barack Obama’s recent executive
order exempting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, and the
bill will give Republicans a chance to freshly debate its funding in the new
year, when they will control both the House and Senate.
Yahoo News’ list of the most interesting and significant policy changes in the year-end spending bill:
Eliminating
a key Wall Street reform. The Democratic-controlled Congress in 2010 approved
sweeping changes to the nation’s financial systems, many of them tailored to
prevent the kind of crisis that tanked the economy in 2008. One of the
centerpieces of the bill was a measure designed to spin off banks’ riskiest
activities into subsidiaries, isolating the main functions of banks from those
risks and also ensuring that taxpayers would not be on the hook to pay for
losses created by those risky trades in the event that they failed. The
spending bill approved by Congress eliminates the so-called push-out provision
from the Dodd-Frank law, meaning that the trading of derivatives — the
risky swaps or bets made against the rise and fall of value in assets — can now
once again happen in-house in Wall Street’s largest banks.
Democrats led
by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren are outraged by this return to old ways,
and she has said she will oppose the whole bill if the provision remains in it.
Dismantling
what was left of campaign finance reform. The Supreme Court since 2010 has
repeatedly struck down political donation restrictions approved by Congress in
the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. With the spending bill approved
by Congress this week, lawmakers at the last minute agreed to undo the most
significant remaining changes from the law: the limits for individuals on how
much they can give to political parties. Before the change, which was inserted
in the last few pages of the mammoth spending bill, the most any one person
could give to a party group like the Democratic National Committee or
Republican National Committee was $32,400 per year. Now any individual will be
able to give anywhere from $97,200 to $777,600,
depending on the interpretation of the language included in the
government-spending bill.
Meddling
in D.C. politics. Because the District
of Columbia is not a state, it relies on Congress
annually to appropriate its budget. And so Washington , D.C.
This year,
Democrats agreed to support Republican language targeting a D.C. ballot
initiative legalizing recreational marijuana, which voters approved by nearly
70 percent in November. The wide-ranging appropriations bill bars funds from
being used for the implementation, regulation and taxation of marijuana and
also, adding insult to injury, mandates that no money provided by Congress can
be used by D.C. officials to petition for representation in Congress. Instead
of a regular congressperson, D.C. has a delegate, Democrat Eleanor Holmes
Norton, who does not have voting privileges in the House.
Cutting
IRS and EPA funding. Republicans are touting cuts to the budgets of the Internal
Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. The spending deal
reduces IRS spending by $345 million in an olive branch to conservatives still
miffed over a scandal involving the agency and its targeting of political
groups that were using nonprofit loopholes to avoid paying certain taxes. The
IRS funding levels in 2015 will now be lower than they were in the 2008 fiscal
year.
Republicans
have cut the EPA's budget for the fifth consecutive year. In a press release
the day after the deal was announced, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, touted cuts
to the EPA as one of the “Ten Things You Should Know About the Omnibus
Appropriations Bill” and the fact that the bill reduces EPA staffing “to the
lowest level since 1989.”
Setting
up a messy immigration funding fight. A key feature of the deal for Republicans
is that it funds most of the government while specifically preventing Congress
from filling the Homeland Security department’s coffers. That particular
bargain will allow the House and Senate GOP majority in 2015 to fight over how
to appropriate overall Homeland Security programs while withholding funds for
the implementation of the president’s immigration executive order. As
Yahoo News previously reported, it will be difficult for the GOP to defund
implementation of the order because the DHS agency that oversees immigration
status changes is self-funded through fees it levies on immigration
applications. And yet by agreeing to this particular deal, Democrats are
setting themselves up for a messy fight with Republicans about the immigration
issue at a time when they will have much less leverage to get their way.
Rolling
back truck safety regulations. A policy rider added to the bill to sweeten the deal for
Republicans will roll back truck safety regulations issued by the Department of
Transportation in 2011 to prevent traffic accidents resulting from trucker
fatigue. The two basic requirements were that drivers take a 30-minute rest
break within the first eight hours of their shifts and take a
"restart" period of 34 hours of rest weekly. According
to the Department of Transportation, the "net effect of these changes
was to reduce the average maximum week a driver could work from 82 hours to 70
hours.” Trucking companies have been lobbying against these changes and now
appear to have secured a victory by getting their repeal included in the
spending bill.
The bill
includes several provisions to protect jobs and rein in
regulatory overreach, including a provision amending the Dodd-Frank law to
protect farmers and other commodity producers from having to put down excessive
collateral to get a loan, expand their businesses, and hedge production.
The bill protects
jobs and advances a number of energy priorities, including a
measure prohibiting funds for the Army Corps of Engineers to change the
definition of “fill material,” a maneuver that would hurt many
industries. The bill also blocks an administration proposal to impose new
fees on onshore oil and gas producers while providing additional resources to
expedite domestic onshore, offshore energy, and minerals development. Notably,
the bill cuts funding for the EPA for the fifth consecutive year, and reduces
its staffing to the lowest level since 1989."
