The margin could be razor thin, but House Republicans think they will pass their funding bill before the government shuts down Thursday.

Top aides and lawmakers on the GOP whip team privately say they believe between 150 and 175 Republicans will support the $1.1 trillion, nine-month government funding bill. And senior House Democrats predict that some of their members will help make up for the Republican defections to get the bill across the finish line.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and his staff have been in contact with Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) throughout the whole process, despite Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) public proclamation that Democrats were worried about provisions tucked into the bill that would loosen Wall Street regulations and campaign finance laws.

In fact, the deal to jack up donation limits to national party committees was negotiated by top aides to a leading Democrat and Republican: Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Of course, things could fall apart – it’s the last day of the 113th Congress, a less-than serendipitous two-year stretch that included a government shutdown and plenty of misjudgments by the House Republican leadership.

But the state of play in the final hours before a vote appears to set up Republican leaders to keep their post-election promise to avert any major crisis in the lame duck session, setting a smooth transition to control of Capitol Hill in January.

And even the worst-case scenario isn’t bad for either party: if the larger funding package falls apart, Boehner will put a three-month stop-gap spending bill on the floor to set up a fiscal fight next year when Republicans have control of both chambers.

In back-channel conversations, White House officials signaled to Capitol Hill Democrats that they prefer the so-called “cromnibus” than the short-term stop-gap bill. The larger package locks in many Democratic - and Republican - funding priorities deep into 2015.

As of late Wednesday evening, Republicans were not formally making fallback plans if the bill failed, and House Democrats weren’t formally whipping against the measure. House Democratic leadership plans to meet Thursday morning ahead of the vote. The government will begin to shut down by Friday morning if nothing passes. Almost no one expects a shutdown.

The session of Congress that started with a failed coup attempt against Boehner will likely end with a bipartisan vote to fund the government – including Obamacare and the president’s changes to immigration law that conservatives hate.

“Without the threat of a government shutdown, this sets up a direct challenge to the president’s unilateral action on immigration when we have new majorities in both chambers of Congress,” Boehner said, explaining his strategy heading into next year.

But there was plenty of angst Wednesday, and Republican and Democratic leaders are hoping it subsides by Thursday morning.

First of all, lawmakers are angry that they only had one full day to read a 1,600-page spending bill that extends all government funding through September 2015, and Homeland Security funding through February.
When lawmakers started digging into the bill, they found a provision that helps big banks trade derivatives in units backstopped by a government guarantee. And another last-minute addition would allow all national party committees to collect $777,000 each year from individuals, up from $32,400 annually under current law.

High-profile lawmakers like Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) vowed to vote against the bill, backed by progressive groups on the outside who were seizing on Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) skepticism.

Republicans were already worried that the legislation doesn’t pick a strong enough fight with Obama over his unilateral changes to immigration law – a few conservative members like Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas and Rep. Tom McClintock of California privately questioned the strategy. Boehner also faced criticism for breaking one of his central 2010 campaign promises: that he would advance legislative issues one at a time.

“All these provisions in this bill got worked out in a bipartisan bicameral fashion or they wouldn’t be in the
bill,” the speaker said. Boehner added, “When you get to the end of a two-year session of Congress, a lot of work gets built up and never gets to cross one floor or the other floor. And as a result, when we get to the end of session, members try to find a way to get their legislation across the finish line because of not really issues on the House side, more issues on the Senate side, to facilitate their ability to move legislation, some of the stuff ends up in one bill.”

The mood was tense in the Capitol Wednesday when GOP leaders started whipping the bill and Senate Democrats were unsure how many of their House counterparts would vote for the bill. But Pelosi and Boehner have been in close contact. On Wednesday morning when they spoke, Boehner demurred when Pelosi asked how many Democratic votes he needed. That responsibility falls to House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Boehner answered. Boehner warned Pelosi that if the large bill failed, he would have a short-term funding bill ready for immediate consideration.

If Republican defections swell, Scalise could catch blame, but if the GOP posts better-than-expected numbers, he’ll start off the 114th Congress with a stronger hand.

Pelosi is trying to regain her own strong hand, which has been weakened dramatically by her party’s disastrous showing on Election Day. She was involved in the negotiations, but objected to many of the last-minute additions to the package - and is using the situation to boost her sway with disaffected Democrats. Pelosi believes she can get Republicans to change the bill, but GOP leadership staff has repeatedly made clear that they will not change the omnibus.

Republicans have one victory in this lame duck: they cleared a renewal of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act by a huge margin. The GOP leadership had hoped to include this legislation in the omnibus, but House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) insisted the TRIA extension include unrelated changes to the Dodd-Frank financial services law. Democrats protested, but the bill passed with 417 votes.

A long-awaited Senate report concludes that the Central Intelligence Agency repeatedly misled the public, Congress and the White House about the agency’s aggressive questioning of detainees — including waterboarding, confinement in small spaces and shackling in stress positions — after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, minimizing the severity of the interrogations and exaggerating the usefulness of the information produced, including its role in setting in motion the U.S. raid that killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report finds that the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” program escaped effective scrutiny by outsiders long after its inception in 2002, with CIA records showing that President George W. Bush was never briefed by the agency on specific techniques such as waterboarding until 2006. Top Bush administration officials such as Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell were not told of the practices until September 2003.

The congressional review also says that the CIA’s actual tactics often went far beyond the terms laid out in Justice Department legal opinions, subjecting detainees to prolonged interrogation under a combination of harsh techniques and ignoring safeguards set forth in the legal memos such as ensuring that interrogators were well-trained and had high-level approvals before using the unusually aggressive tactics.

President Barack Obama issued a statement that stopped short of completely endorsing the report’s conclusions, but he reiterated his opposition to the Bush-era interrogation practices.

“The report documents a troubling program involving enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects in secret facilities outside the United States, and it reinforces my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests,” Obama said. “These techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners.”

Obama was silent on the issues of whether the CIA misled outsiders about the program and about whether it produced important intelligence but he emphasized that he banned the harsh techniques soon after he took office

“Rather than another reason to refight old arguments, I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong—in the past,” he said.

Among the report’s key findings:

Quote

* Interrogation sessions were far more brutal than publicly revealed and went far beyond the scope of Justice Department approvals. Alleged 9/11 mastermind Abu Zubaydah was interrogated continuously for 17 days straight, being subjected to 183 waterboarding sessions and confinement in stress positions. He was told preparations were being made for his cremation. During one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah lost consciousness and water and air bubbles began pouring out of his mouth. The incident was never reported to senior CIA management, but discovered by the Senate in e-mails of CIA medical personnel.

* The CIA had little grip on basic details such as the number of detainees in the program. According to agency records, at least 119 prisoners were involved, but CIA officials represented the number at less that 100. At least a sixth of the prisoners didn’t meet the stated criteria. Sometimes senior officials were confused about where detainees were located. Vice President Dick Cheney at one point ran into diplomatic trouble because he was unaware one country was hosting a so-called black site.

* While Bush has defended the program and taken responsibility for authorizing it, he was apparently told for the first time about the details of the interrogation techniques in 2006. CIA records show that at that briefing he expressed discomfort with the “image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself.”

* Key Cabinet officials such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State were kept out of the loop about the program until September 2003. An e-mail from CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo said White House staff insisted the reason was to avoid leaks, but Rizzo said it was “clear to us” that National Security Council officials feared Powell “would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s going on.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) charged that the interrogation tactics amounted to “torture,” although the report itself doesn’t explicitly make that claim.

“The CIA’s actions a decade ago are a stain on our history and our values….Releasing this report is an important step to restore our values and show the world we are in fact a just and lawful society,” she said in a speech on the Senate floor. “This program was morally, legally and administrative misguided…..The CIA program was far more brutal than people were led to believe.”

CIA officials say the Senate review is deeply flawed, in large part because the study which formally began in 2009 relied solely on written CIA documents and did not include direct interviews with key players. The spy agency says the Senate report understates the value of intelligence received from detainees and that management problems identified in the report were rectified relatively early in the program.

CIA Director John Brennan conceded missteps in the agency’s interrogation effort, but sharply disagreed with other conclusions in the report.

“We acknowledge that the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the Agency made mistakes,” the director said. “The most serious problems occurred early on and stemmed from the fact that the agency was unprepared and lacked the core competencies required to carry out an unprecedented, worldwide program of detaining and interrogating suspected al-Qa’ida and affiliated terrorists.

“In carrying out that program, we did not always live up to the high standards that we set for ourselves and that the American people expect of us,” Brennan added. “As an agency, we have learned from these mistakes.”

Brennan insisted that information obtained through the program headed off deadly terrorist attacks and he rejected the idea that CIA deliberately covered-up its actions.

“Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qa’ida and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day,” the director said. “While we made mistakes, the record does not support the study’s inference that the Agency systematically and intentionally misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the program.”

For his part, Obama was silent on the issues of whether the CIA misled outsiders about the program and about whether it produced important intelligence but he emphasized that he banned the harsh techniques soon after he took office

“Rather than another reason to refight old arguments, I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong — in the past,” Obama said in the White House statement.

The Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify the roughly 500-page executive summary of the 6,000-page report but the publication was delayed as lawmakers and the White House debated how to handle sensitive information such as agents’ names and other identifying characteristics.

U.S. military commanders and embassies worldwide have been bracing for possible fallout and security threats due to the release of the report.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that the release “may have an impact” on U.S. interests abroad, but said it’s nonetheless essential for the facts of the Bush administration’s practices to be made public, where possible.

“We want to be sure that we can release that report, be transparent about it and be clear about what American values are and be clear about the fact that the administration believes and that — in a way that’s consistent with American values — that something like this should never happen again,” Earnest said.

But Republicans are worried about the threats that the report’s release may stir up. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said Sunday on CNN that foreign leaders and U.S. intelligence officials have made clear their warnings that the report’s release “will cause violence and deaths.”

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) said in a statement Monday night that the report’s publication “is reckless and irresponsible” given concerns about the international response. “This report does not qualify as either serious or constructive.”

Just after taking office in 2009, Obama signed executive orders ending the use of controversial Bush-era interrogation techniques and floated the idea of conducting a public accounting of the practices of his predecessor’s administration. But the review released Tuesday came not from the Obama administration but from Congress, and after administration officials engaged in a months-long tug-of-war over what would be made public.

The White House has said that Obama “strongly supports” making the report public, but the CIA and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough have been wrangling for months with Feinstein to limit details that Democratic senators say are crucial to understanding the narrative of the program.

“Without the leadership of [Intelligence panel chair] Sen. Feinstein and her determination and the support of Democrats on the committee, there’s no chance that this would see the light of day,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Monday.

Resistance from the administration included Secretary of State John Kerry’s Friday call to Feinstein, in which he asked her to “consider” the timing of the release “because a lot is going on in the world, and [Kerry] wanted to make sure that foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said.

The CIA hacked into a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee and read the emails of staffers involved in the interrogation investigation, the agency’s own internal investigation this summer concluded. Feinstein first revealed knowledge of the breach in March, saying that the conflict between her panel and the CIA reflected “a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community.”

The intelligence committee’s Democratic majority voted in April to declassify the summary and time had almost run out before Tuesday’s release, since panel’s incoming chair, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and his fellow Republicans have made clear that they opposed its release.

The United States and France have signed an accord that will compensate thousands of Holocaust survivors and their families who were deported to concentration camps by France's state rail company during Nazi occupation.

At a State Department ceremony Monday, French human rights ambassador Patrizianna Sparacino-Thiellay said the agreement will cover thousands of survivors, their spouses or heirs in the U.S. who have not been covered by earlier compensation funds.

The money is available to survivors of all nationalities who were deported by French rail company SNCF between 1940 and 1944.

The $60 million compensation fund still must get approval from the French Parliament, which could take months.

U.S. Special Adviser on Holocaust Issues Stuart Eizenstat called the agreement a belated and imperfect justice for one of history's darkest eras.

An outgoing Senate Democrat wants to take federal money from low-income college students to pay student loan contractors, whose tactics toward borrowers have been criticized by consumer advocates, federal regulators and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate education committee and the appropriations subcommittee in charge of federal education expenditures, has proposed taking $303 million from the Pell grant program to increase revenues for some of the nation’s biggest student loan specialists, according to a July 24 version of a 2015 fiscal year spending bill now being negotiated by congressional leaders.

Student advocates and congressional aides largely missed Harkin’s move last summer -- partly because the full text of the spending bill wasn’t publicly released until six weeks after Harkin’s subcommittee approved it. They only noticed it in recent days as congressional negotiators work off his bill in the rush to finalize discussions on the federal government’s 2015 spending plans.

The government's spending authority expires Dec. 11. A government shutdown could follow unless Democrats and Republicans reach a deal. Congressional negotiators may eventually decide to spare the Pell program from cuts.

The Pell program is the nation’s largest source of grant aid for college students, according to the White House, and is meant for students from low- and middle-income households. Three of every four students who took out Pell grants during the 2012-13 award year had household incomes of $30,000 or less, according to the Department of Education. Nearly 8.9 million students are forecast to receive on average $3,826 from the program during the 2015 fiscal year, White House budget documents show. The neediest students can receive a maximum of $5,830.

The program has a surplus that the Congressional Budget Office in April predicted will evaporate and turn into a deficit by the 2017 fiscal year, which begins October 2016. Some analysts have said they fear the deficit will come sooner. Harkin wants to use that temporary pot of money to enable the Education Department to increase pay for student loan companies that collect borrowers’ monthly payments.

Student advocates said they’re outraged.

“I am appalled that Senator Harkin would put servicers -- who profit by hundreds of millions of dollars a year -- over the needs of low-income students,” said Alexandra Flores-Quilty, vice president of the United States Student Association. “Taking funding out of Pell and using it to pay private student loan servicers goes directly against the interests of students.”

Harkin has also floated the possibility of taking $2 billion out of the Pell program to use for other federal programs, according to Democratic and Republican congressional aides. Harkin reportedly dismissed concerns that such a move would affect students, according to Politico.

It was unclear Friday whether congressional negotiators were still discussing the $2 billion cut. Student advocates warned that if it were to occur, the Pell program would face a $3.6 billion deficit in the fiscal year beginning next October and the likelihood of deep cuts.

For Harkin, a longtime liberal who retires from Congress in January after a 30-year Senate career, the move risks damaging his reputation as an advocate for college students struggling to afford rising tuition.

“Senator Harkin has built a legacy on being a champion for students trying to afford college. We'd be deeply disappointed to see his subcommittee abandon its support for the Pell grant and jeopardize the aspirations of millions of low-income young people,” said Jennifer Wang, policy director at Young Invincibles, an advocacy organization that represents 18 to 34 year-olds.

Susannah Cernojevich, a spokeswoman for Harkin, didn’t return calls or emails seeking comment. Harkin’s office said negotiations over spending plans were ongoing.

The Education Department, which owns or guarantees nearly 90 percent of the more than $1 trillion in outstanding student loans, outsources the work of interacting with borrowers to companies such as Navient Corp., the former servicing unit of student loan giant Sallie Mae, and Nelnet Inc. The department spent $678 million on loan servicing in the fiscal year that ended in September 2013, budget documents show.

But amid an era of stagnant wages and increasing loan burdens, federal policymakers are concerned that the Education Department’s loan servicers aren’t devoting enough resources to helping borrowers. In the federal government’s main student loan program, nearly a quarter of loans, or 23 percent, are either delinquent or in default, according to the Education Department. The delinquency totals likely would be higher if borrowers weren’t postponing payments.

Sarah Bloom Raskin, deputy treasury secretary, has questioned why the Education Department’s loan servicers have allowed some 7 million borrowers to default on their loans, given the generous repayment plans that exist in the federal student loan program.

The U.S. Department of Justice accused Navient of deliberately cheating as many as 60,000 active-duty troops out of as much as $60 million. Navient neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

Consumer groups and student advocates have accused the Education Department’s contractors of misleading borrowers about their repayment options and mistreating them when they request help.

Even President Barack Obama has questioned the companies’ commitment to helping student loan borrowers manage their obligations, when he declared in June that the Education Department would renegotiate its contracts “to make it clear that these companies are in the business of helping students, not just collecting payments, and they owe young people the customer service, and support, and financial flexibility that they deserve.”

Harkin has largely avoided criticizing the Education Department.

Rather than investigate allegations of wrongdoing or punish instances of documented misdeeds -- actions the Education Department has largely declined to take -- the Obama administration decided this year to increase loan servicers’ pay in the hopes that the promise of more money would lead them to improve their treatment of borrowers.

In its annual budget request to Congress, the Obama administration in March requested an additional $42 million to pay the Education Department’s student loan servicers for the 2015 fiscal year. The administration wants Congress to authorize up to $772 million to be spent on loan servicing activities, an increase from past years driven by the skyrocketing growth of federal student loans. Some 40 million borrowers collectively owe $1.1 trillion, nearly double the amount owed in 2008, according to the Education Department.

For the first time in recent years, Congress has to authorize the entire sum that the Education Department can spend on its loan servicers. A 2010 law that annually set aside hundreds of millions of dollars for new, smaller not-for-profit loan servicers so they could snatch business from companies such as Navient and Nelnet was repealed in December 2013.

The Education Department had been using most of that money to pay its larger contractors, bucking the wishes of Congress. For example, in 2013, the department had $386 million available to spend on not-for-profit servicers. Only about a quarter of that, or $99 million, actually went toward smaller firms, budget documents show.

Dorie Nolt, an Education Department spokeswoman, declined to comment.

The Obama administration asked Congress to authorize new spending to replace the loss of the not-for-profit set-aside. It didn’t request that Congress tap funds in the Pell grant program to pay for it.

Enter Harkin.

His solution is to take $303 million out of the Pell program, and give $269 million of it to the Education Department so it could pay its student loan servicers. The money would go to a general pot of funds used to pay Navient and Nelnet, among others.

“It makes no sense to cut grants to students in order to pay loan servicers millions of dollars,” said Chris Hicks, an organizer who leads the Debt-Free Future campaign for Jobs With Justice, a Washington-based nonprofit.

Vincent Morris, a spokesman for the Senate Appropriations Committee, declined to comment.

Student advocates said they’re worried that Harkin’s move will set a dangerous precedent for the incoming Republican-led Senate. They argued that if Democrats are willing to raid Pell funds to pay for other programs, Republicans surely will do the same.

Funding for the Pell program historically has been rocky, especially in recent years. Budget authority has fluctuated from $17.3 billion for the 2006 fiscal year, to $42 billion for 2011, to $28.9 billion for 2014, according to the Education Department.

Pell grants act like an entitlement program, in that eligible students are entitled to funds regardless of the money available. Money unused from a fiscal year create a surplus that’s available for subsequent years; annual deficits, which occur when demand outstrips available funding, are generally covered by funds meant for future years.

At the moment, the program has about a $4.4 billion surplus as a result of unused funding from previous years. Assuming Congress doesn’t alter the amount of money it makes available for Pell grants, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the surplus will become a deficit by 2017.

If annual deficits persist, and Congress doesn’t make more money available, the federal government would have to curb the amount of assistance available to future low-income students.

“Any cuts to Pell Grants will leave a legacy of failing to support students,” Hicks said of Harkin.

• Does the militarization of police further separate the community, which is meant to be protected and follow the law, to the people "protecting" them?
• Does the militarization of police further ingrain the thought that they are above the law?
• Is it a good idea to provide money for police to buy "tank-like vehicles", as the Syracuse Police Chief here in New York would like to do?
• Where is the limit?