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\n

House Republicans have narrowly advanced a request from the White House to claw back $9.4 billion that lawmakers have already approved for public media and more than a dozen accounts across the State Department focused on foreign assistance.<\/p>\n

The 214-212 vote is a major victory for President Donald Trump, who had been lobbying hard for lawmakers to pass the legislation<\/u><\/a>, including in a social media post shortly before members went to the floor.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor decades, Republicans have promised to cut NPR, but have never done it, until now,\u201d Trump said, in part. \u201cThe Rescissions Bill is a NO BRAINER, and every single Republican in Congress should vote, \u2018YES.\u2019 MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a huge relief for Speaker Mike Johnson, who hours earlier was projecting cautious optimism that the package of funding cuts<\/u><\/a> would pass despite knowing his margins were exceedingly narrow.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think we have the votes. We\u2019re going ahead with it,\u201d Johnson told reporters Thursday afternoon.<\/p>\n

One \u201cyes\u201d vote: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who is known to frequently break with his party.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst time I\u2019ve ever seen us cut spending in my life. I would be \u2018yea\u2019 all day long,\u201d Massie said in a brief interview earlier this week, previewing his support.<\/p>\n

The final margin was narrow \u2014 as many as six Republicans had been recorded as opposing the bill; two of those ultimately changed their votes. Johnson and Whip Tom Emmer huddled with the holdouts on the House floor during the vote to try to sway them in favor of the measure; Budget Chair Jodey Arrington also touched base with multiple of the Republicans who had cast no votes.<\/p>\n

The legislation would revoke $8.3 billion in foreign aid and $1.1 billion for public broadcasting. It faced opposition from some Republican lawmakers concerned about slashing the President\u2019s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and how emergency alerts could be impacted by the public media cuts.<\/p>\n

House Republican leadership and White House officials spent days trying to assuage the concerns of lawmakers worried that the clawbacks would hurt their local public broadcasting stations, emergency alert systems and efforts to prevent AIDS around the world.<\/p>\n

In defense of cuts to public broadcasting, senior GOP lawmakers argued that the local PBS affiliates in their home states do good work but that those in some other states air inappropriate programming.<\/p>\n

“These stations are some of the most partisan stations out there. Can you imagine if a conservative station was funded? The left would have screamed, vilified and exterminated it a long while ago,” said Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), during floor debate.<\/p>\n

Democrats countered that\u2019s a lie. \u201cThat\u2019s BS. It\u2019s total BS,\u201d Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the House\u2019s top Democratic appropriator, said in a brief interview. \u201cThese comments that it’s \u2018woke\u2019 in this state or that \u2014 what the hell do you know? Nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, there are discussions underway among many appropriators that they could try to offset some of these slashes in upcoming spending bills, since the funding cuts won\u2019t impact accounts until after the new fiscal year kicks in come October 1.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am concerned about the future of trying to do away with public television. I\u2019m a supporter of public television in Idaho, they do a fantastic job,\u201d said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, who ultimately voted in favor of the bill.<\/p>\n

The package now heads to the Senate, where Republicans are discussing whether they can amend it \u2013 despite the complicated mechanics for doing so. The rescissions process was created under the decades-old law enacted to block presidents from withholding federal cash Congress has already approved.<\/p>\n

The Senate also has the option to approve sections of the package piecemeal and reject others. That\u2019s what Congress did back in 1995 when the House and Senate approved a rescissions package that clawed back less funding than then-President Bill Clinton had requested to cut. But doing that would send it back to the House, where passage a second time may not be guaranteed.<\/p>\n

Congress has until midnight on July 18 to act on the legislation<\/u><\/a>, otherwise the proposal will expire and the White House is required to spend the money as lawmakers intended.<\/p>\n

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

House Republicans have narrowly advanced a request from the White House to claw back $9.4 billion that lawmakers have already approved for public media and more than a dozen accounts across the State Department focused on foreign assistance. The 214-212 vote is a major victory for President Donald Trump, who had been lobbying hard for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}