Congress agrees to raise US debt ceiling and provide $15bn in hurricane aid

Congress on Friday approved with bipartisan majorities a budget and hurricane relief deal brokered between Donald Trump and top Democrats.

By a vote of 316 to 90, the House of Representatives approved a bill to raise the debt ceiling, fund the federal government through 8 December and provide $15bn for relief from Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas and Louisiana last month. All 90 votes against came from Republicans.

The deal, which was approved by the Senate on Thursday by 80-17, came as Hurricane Irma bore down on Florida.

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Its genesis was an Oval Office meeting on Wednesday between Trump, treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, Mike Pence and congressional leaders from both parties. Trump readily agreed to a Democratic proposal to tie hurricane relief to funding the federal government and increasing the debt ceiling for a three-month period.

Republican leaders had pushed for a longer-term deal, to raise the debt ceiling through the 2018 midterm elections.

Democrats received rapturously a deal Republicans were forced to grudgingly accept. Many congressional Republicans have long been opposed to raising the debt ceiling without taking steps to reduce federal spending.

Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney received a frosty welcome when they pitched the deal to congressional Republicans in a conference meeting on Friday morning.

Mnuchin, a former Democrat, and Mulvaney, a stalwart of the House Freedom Caucus before joining the Trump adminstration, made less than ideal surrogates.

At the meeting, Mnuchin provoked hissing and groans when he closed with a plea for members to “vote for the debt ceiling for me”.

The meeting also got “a little warm for Mulvaney at times” according to Mark Walker, a North Carolina representative who noted that people in the room “reminded him [of] some of the statements he had made in the past about relief packages tied to the debt ceiling”.

After leaving the meeting, Mulvaney dodged a question about whether he would have voted for the bill, choosing to praise Trump’s decision to reach across the aisle.

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“I thought it was absolutely the right thing to do,” the former South Carolina congressman said. “The president is a very results driven person, he wants to see results.”

Peter King, a moderate from New York, saw the vote as a precursor to better days to come. “We continue to work across the aisle we’ll get things done, we can’t let one faction control everything,” he said in a veiled shot at the Freedom Caucus. “We represent the country, not a party.”

With these must-pass measures out of the way, Trump is expected to spend the coming months focusing on promoting his plans for major tax cuts.

No bill has yet been introduced in Congress but Trump has made several speeches touting his proposals to lower corporate taxes to as little as 15%.

On Friday morning, after tweets about hurricane Irma and his frustration with Senate rules and the failure of healthcare reform, the president wrote: “Republicans must start the Tax Reform/Tax Cut legislation ASAP. Don’t wait until the end of September. Needed now more than ever. Hurry!”