Harry Reid: 'We Need Republicans to Work With Us' to Fund Democrat Priorities
(CNSNews.com) - "Unless Republicans go along with Democrats, "the government shuts down at midnight this Friday," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said on Tuesday. "If we fail to meet that deadline, it will be another evidence of a Republican failure in leadership."
Reid said if Republican fail to pass an omnibus appropriations bill by midnight on Dec. 11 -- a date they picked -- it will be because they continue to attach their "ideological agenda" to the must-pass omnibus.
"No legislation will pass with these poison pill riders. We passed a bipartisan budget agreement, we did it through good-faith negotiations. It was meant to stop a government shutdown, and we need Republicans to work with us, to stop with their demands for provisions that won't be signed into law."
'Push the Tea Party demands aside'
Speaking at the same news conference, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) also said Republicans had better work with Democrats if they know what's good for them:
"[If] there's one thing that's clear from the past few years, it is that the only way for Republican leaders to avoid a Tea Party crisis is to work with Democrats to get things done," Murray said.
"We saw that with our bipartisan budget deals, we are seeing that today with the Every Student Succeeds Act, and I'm hoping that we can see it again with this omnibus."
Murray said Republicans are "still playing games" by trying to jam through policy riders that have no chance of becoming law and that would be devastating for our workers, our seniors, our women and our families if they do.
"So they need to push the Tea Party demands aside, they need to drop their poison pill riders and work with us to finish this budget process in a way that works for middle class families and the economy."
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters on Tuesday [1], "we're not going to let the arbitrary December 11th deadline stop us from getting this right. We're going to get the best agreement we can possibly get, and those negotiations are ongoing."
Ryan held out the possibility of passing a short-term ("handful of days") continuing resolution to keep taxpayer money flowing at current levels until the omnibus spending package can be passed.
President Obama has promised to veto a CR. The White House says Republicans have had enough time to meet their own deadline. "The president is not going to ...sign a piece of legislation to give them more time to negotiate on a set of ideological riders," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday.
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http://cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/harry-reid-we-need-republicans-work-us-fund-democrat-priorities 
