Last budget deal of the year for U.S. Congress goes into overtime

WASHINGTON - As a stand off over add-ons to a year-end budget deal intensify, Congress is poised to miss today's deadline of avoiding a government shutdown and buy a few more days with a stopgap bill.

Democrats are resisting dozens of GOP-led efforts to roll back women's reproductive health services, halt environmental regulations and undo financial services reforms approved after the Great Recession.

But Democrats also are pushing to add on their own priorities to the deal, including lifting a ban on federal gun violence research.

The Senate approved a stopgap spending measure Thursday and the House is expected to pass it today, when funding officially runs out. The White House signaled it will sign the measure as long as it pushes the deadline back by only a few days to give more time.

But House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, D-Wis., declined to commit to meeting the new deadline of Wednesday.

'We don't want to rush legislation, especially big legislation like this omnibus appropriations,” he said at a Thursday news briefing. 'We're trading offers. We're talking to each other. We're doing all of the things that you would do, the appropriators and the leaders, so that we can get to an agreement.”

Congress reached a budget accord in the fall, which set government spending levels through the remainder of the fiscal year and gave lawmakers until today to develop the funding bill.

But approving the details of the $1.1 trillion spending plan have fallen into a familiar pattern of brinkmanship as both parties use the must-pass measure to tack on policy priorities.

Complicating efforts is a separate battle to extend or possibly make permanent dozens of specialty tax breaks routinely approved at the end of each year.

The tax breaks cover a long list of constituent-pleasing write-offs, like for teachers to deduct classroom expenses or NASCAR owners to develop race tracks. New this year are tax breaks for citrus and nut growers, as well as changes for real estate investment trusts.

But Congress is also considering doing away with two Affordable Care Act taxes, including the 40 percent tax on high-end health care plans that Democrats want to undo, and another on medical-device manufacturers that Republicans have led efforts to repeal.

Making those and the other tax breaks permanent would be a sweeping compromise, a nearly $700 billion undertaking that appears increasingly difficult.

Democrats believe time is on their side because Ryan, like former Speaker John A. Boehner, cannot rely on his majority Republicans to pass the spending bill. Most Republicans opposed the fall budget accord, which required House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to rally Democrats for passage.

With Ryan again needing Democratic votes, Pelosi is able to drive a hard bargain.

'Let's try to take this opportunity to say: ‘You want to pass a bill that has all of your priorities in it? Our priority is to remove the ban on research on gun violence,'” Pelosi said Thursday.

One area of common ground may be inclusion of a House-passed measure to restrict visa-free travel from European countries and some U.S. allies in Asia.

The bill, brought in response to recent terrorist attacks in Paris and California, was approved overwhelmingly in the House and has support in the Senate.

And talks also seem to be coalescing around a plan to end the decades-old ban against U.S. oil exports, a GOP priority that Democrats may accept if their other goals are also met.

Republicans, though, are also pushing to block Syrian refugees from entering the United States, a bill that was approved by a wide margin in the House but has been panned by Senate Democrats and the White House.

Negotiations are expected to continue this weekend.