Boehner to Senate Dems: Don't 'get greedy'

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) warned Senate Democrats not to “get greedy” and add extraneous provisions to a House-passed bill to prevent a government shutdown later this month.

“Everyone has something they would like to add to this bill,” Boehner said Thursday at his weekly Capitol news conference. “But the House is not using this as a vehicle to advance other agendas, and I would hope the Senate, too, would avoid doing so and would either pass our bill or only make straightforward changes.”

The House, on a bipartisan vote, approved a continuing resolution Wednesday that keeps the government open for six months and includes full appropriations bills for the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. It did not include some policy items that conservatives wanted, such as measures to defund the 2010 healthcare law.

Boehner said if the Senate sent back a bill loaded up with Democratic policy priorities, the House would scrap the military appropriations and send back a simple stopgap spending bill instead. The appropriations bills in the House measure give the Pentagon more flexibility to carry out automatic spending cuts from sequestration.

“If Senate Democrats try to load up this bill with extraneous provisions, partisan riders, budget gimmicks we will be prepared to move a clean continuing resolution through the end of the fiscal year,” Boehner said. “I don’t want to do that. I don’t think that would help our troops, so I would urge Democrat leaders in the Senate to not get greedy and get carried away and try to put forward a possibility of a government shutdown. Our goal here is to cut spending, not to shut down the government.”

The Speaker did not specify what he considered “extraneous,” and a spokesman refused to elaborate. Senate Democrats are likely to try to add several other appropriations bills for other departments, but they say those additions will reflect sequestration and stem from agreements that were already hashed out by Republican and Democratic appropriators in both chambers.