Negotiators from the House, Senate, and White House havehammered out a tentative deal to fund the government for the rest of the 2011fiscal year. That deal gives Republicans most of what they wanted and savesDemocrats only from a few policy riders that they’d feared. It cuts, reportedly, $39 billion of spending, and that’s $8 billion more than Republicans had started asking for in February, when this process started.
What did Democrats win? These cuts are still $22 billion less than HR1, the GOP’s continuing resolution that failed in the Senate. The riders that would defund Planned Parenthood and the implementation of health care reform will get votes of their own in the Senate, and that’s a great deal for Democrats, because neither measure has a chance in hell.
I’ll have more about all of this shortly – it’s mixed, and we are going to learn a lot more about what actually gets cut, but just as a shutdown would have been blamed on Republicans, this deal makes them look like winners.
