Congress Passes Massive $1.1T Spending Package

Congress on Friday easily passed a $1.1 trillion spending package to fund the government through next September, averting the risk of a government shutdown for a while.

The House passed the 2,009-page measure 316-113 despite some uncertainty about its fate a day earlier. Some Democrats expressed opposition to the bill, as did a number of conservatives because of various policy provisions tucked inside.

The Senate passed voted 65-33 in favor of the package, which also included a bill to extend expired tax breaks that the House passed on Thursday.

The White House has said President Obama would sign the package, which will remove the threat of a government shutdown until September 30, about a month before the 2016 elections.

Congressional leaders reached the deal late Tuesday, posting the bill in the wee hours on Wednesday, after weeks of negotiations over contentious policy riders.

Hours after its release, House Democrats began to raise concerns with the deal because they said its lifting of the 40-year-old ban on crude oil exports could send American jobs overseas. They also questioned why the spending package didn't address Puerto Rico's debt crisis.

The repeal of the decades-old crude oil export ban was considered a major win for Republicans, who at the same time, did not score certain provisions that conservatives had demanded.

The spending bill also doesn't include GOP riders that would have targeted the U.S.'s new policy to normalize relations with Cuba or the Obama administration's plan to take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year.