House narrowly passes spending bill after chaos on Capitol Hill

A massive spending bill to fund the federal government narrowly passed on the House floor Thursday evening after a chaotic day of vote counting and uncertainty, unfolding just hours before the government was set to run out of money.

The bill was negotiated by leaders from both parties in the House and Senate. House Speaker John Boehner earlier in the day predicted it would pass. But opposition emerged from rank and file in both parties over separate concerns.

The final vote was 219-206.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the Senate would quickly pass a short-term funding measure to prevent government funding from lapsing at midnight, and work to pass the bigger spending bill starting Friday.

Boehner needed and received some Democratic votes to pass the bill because a contingent of Republicans refused to vote for the measure, protesting that it did not stop President Obama’s recent executive action to defer deportation for some undocumented immigrants.

The speaker of the House praised passage of the bill, which only funds the Department of Homeland Security through the end of February. House Republicans have vowed to use that leverage to fight the Obama immigration policy.

“By the House’s action, we are setting up a direct challenge to the president’s unilateral actions on immigration next month, when there will be new Republican majorities in both chambers. The Senate should act on this bipartisan legislation in short order,” Boehner said after the vote.

Democrats revolted in part because of the inclusion of a measure removing a key provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. The change would allow banks trading in certain types of derivatives to receive insurance from the federal government, which Dodd-Frank outlawed. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called the bill “blackmail” in a speech on the House floor, saying the changes were the price Republicans demanded for funding the government.

The combination of those factors put the bill’s passage in doubt for most of the afternoon, until the dramatic vote on the measure late in the evening. The White House lobbied Democrats to support the bill.

The vote on the $1.1 trillion bill was originally supposed to take place around 2 p.m. But Republican leaders pulled the bill from consideration in a surprise move.

In the end, 57 Democrats supported the bill, along with 162 Republicans. Sixty-seven Republicans voted against it.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where its passage, and a subsequent signature from President Obama, will fund most of the government until September 2015.