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U.S. House Speaker says Congress needs to pass another short-term government funding bill

Xinhua, December 16, 2015 Adjust font size:

U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday that Congress needs to pass another short-term government funding measure to buy time for having a vote on the 1.15-trillion-U.S.-dollar government spending bill on Thursday.

Speaking at a breakfast event sponsored by Politico, Ryan said the long-term government spending bill, which will pay for government operations through next September, would be unveiled later in the day and expected to take a vote on Thursday.

"We are putting our bills together. We have been negotiating, will be posting sometime today," he said, adding that they have made it clear there will be no government shutdown.

Ryan said Congress needs to pass another short-term government funding measure because the current government funding bill will expire Wednesday midnight and he would not waive a rule that would give lawmakers three days to review the 1.15-trillion-dollar government spending bill before voting.

Asked on whether the majority of House Republicans would back the massive spending bill, Ryan said he would not predict "how the vote count will go down", but was confident the bill would finally approved by Congress with compromises from both parties.

"Look, in negotiations like this, you win some, you lose some. Democrats won some, they lost some, we won some, we lost some. At the end of the day, we are going to get this done," he said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said at the same event that the long-term government spending bill will make several expired tax breaks permanent, which he believed would boost the U.S. economy.

But House Democrats voiced strong opposition to the tax-break proposal, arguing that it's too big and expensive.

"It would undermine the deficit creating a larger debt. It would undermine tax reform," Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic whip, told reporters on Tuesday. "I hope it will be rejected by the House and by the Senate."

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi also said last week that her party could not support a measure to renew expiring tax breaks and warned that it must be separated from the government spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. Endit