The White House’s aggressive push to salvage a spending bill on Capitol Hill left liberal lawmakers feeling burned by President Barack Obama — and raised significant doubts about their desire to cooperate heading into next year’s Republican takeover of Congress.

Democrats will need every vote they can muster next year as the GOP plans to attack liberal priorities on health care, energy and financial regulation in 2015. But Thursday’s deadline drama offered no signal of party unity, only fresh reminders of the post-election divisions between a president who’s looking to govern during his last two years in office and a newly invigorated populist wing of the party, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).


The $1.1 trillion spending bill passed the House late Thursday, with 57 Democrats voting for the bill while 139 voted against it — with many liberals seething over a provision that rolled back a key financial regulation that is part of the Dodd-Frank law.

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“A vote for this bill is a vote for future taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street,” Warren said Thursday. “It is time for all of us to stand up and fight.”

Obama and Biden dialed for votes all day, and dispatched Obama Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to meet with House Democrats, hoping to sooth Democrats’ concerns over policy riders that showed up in the trillion-dollar spending bill and were blasted by liberal stalwarts Warren and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

While the eleventh-hour intervention may have pushed the bill across the finish line, it also sparked a fresh round of finger-pointing among Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House. For the increasingly liberal factions of Democrats on Capitol Hill, the White House’s work was too little, too late.

“I do not share the White House’s view,” said Rep. Steve Israel of New York, a member of Democratic leadership after meeting with McDonough.

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Obama’s base said he tried to sell them out—and didn’t even wait to do it until Republicans officially expand their majority in the House and take over the Senate come January. And some on the left worried the wide range of policy riders in a spending bill were a worrisome sign as Republicans take over the Senate next year – and are already urging Obama to steel himself and ready his veto pen for what’s to come.

“We gave Democrats in the House multiple opportunities to negotiate the best deal they could get,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said late Thursday on MSNBC, explaining why the president and others were whipping votes. “The good news is they got a pretty good deal.”

Few liberals saw things his way. The White House’s support for the measure sent them into a rage, including a very rare and blunt split between Pelosi and the president which began when a White House statement landed in Washington inboxes on Thursday afternoon. The message from the president: The bill has plenty to scoff at, but you should vote for it anyway.

“I’m enormously disappointed the White House feels the only way they could get a bill is to go along with this,” Pelosi said Thursday afternoon, coming to the floor to declare that she wouldn’t be voting for the bill so long as it includes the Dodd-Frank rollback “blackmail.”

Earnest said that while Obama has his problems with what’s in the bill, he was enthusiastic about the negotiations that led to the final deal, including several Democratic priorities.

“This is the kind of compromise the president’s been seeking from Republicans for years now,” Earnest said.

A year ago, Republicans were willing to shut down the government over trying to defund Obamacare. But by taking the shutdown off the table this time around, Obama enabled Republicans to slip in several measures that liberals hate, including major campaign finance changes he opposes and a rollback of a Dodd-Frank financial regulation he fought so hard to get.

After meeting with McDonough, several Democrats said the White House had done nothing to change anyone’s minds. Fighting the battle later was better than compromising now — the opposite argument that was coming from the White House.

“If I go home and say ‘well, I had to vote to give new special favors to billionaires and the big Wall Street banks who destroyed the economy and my district’s still hurting, because otherwise, we would’ve had a 90-day CR.’ You know what they’re gonna say? ‘What the hell is a 90-day CR?’” said Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), referring to a three-month extension of government funding called a continuing resolution.

Though Pelosi was the star of the Democratic revolt, she had major air support on the other side of the Capitol from Warren, who for a second consecutive day railed against the legislation that the White House was pushing. The message from the two was clear: Hold the line.

“Democrats don’t want it in,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told POLITICO. “I don’t know a Democrat that wants it in at all.”

In his first big showdown with Congress since the Republican romp in the midterms, Obama chose to stick with his standard of letting the Hill work out the funding, largely playing defense instead of offense, at least until the last minute. The result — a bill tilted heavily toward Republican priorities — was a compromise that the White House said Obama was eager to sign as soon as he could get it.

So instead of touting major wins on the spending bill, the White House had to push smaller victories, like money to fight Ebola and extra funding to fight ISIS.

Early childhood education, funding for climate action — those are things they wanted, White House aides repeatedly insisted in the last few days. They got funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. And they stopped Republicans from gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Democrats also believe they were able to achieve higher spending levels overall than they would be able to get starting next year.

Within the White House, the retrenchment has been underway for days. Avoiding a shutdown, despite how much political damage the 2013 standoff did to Republicans, was a requirement. Protecting against cuts to Obamacare or immediate slashes in response to the president’s immigration reform executive orders was enormous, and they worked themselves into thinking of anything else as sprinkles on top of the icing on the cake. Just the basics of having an omnibus bill instead of just a more temporary continuing resolution funding measure would be a major victory, in their telling.

But on the Hill, the discontent was palpable.

“There’s a lot of stuff in there that’ll give you heartburn,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).

Heading into the Senate Democrats’ caucus meeting Tester caught the eye of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

“How’s it going in there?” he asked.

Gillibrand frowned. Tester laughed.

“Looks are worth a thousand words,” he said, summing up the mood.

Even though the White House struggled to bend Democrats’ arms, some in the party argued that Obama couldn’t have done much to change the dynamics of this or any other deal — even when Republicans control both chambers of Congress.

“This is a compromise that Republicans and Democrats in the House decided on. I don’t worry that it’s going to get better or if it’s going to get worse if the president’s going to be involved more in negotiations,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).

Brown, who earlier in the day wrote a letter with Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter protesting the inclusion of the Dodd-Frank measures, said that the future of the financial regulations now rests with Obama and McConnell.

“Next year, the president’s going to use his veto pen to stop the wholesale destruction of Dodd-Frank,” Brown said.

Brown said he could see some of the logic behind president’s decision to allow the rollbacks in this funding bill.

“I don’t think he wanted to threaten because there’s so much else. But next year: ‘You weaken Dodd-Frank, I veto this bill, don’t even bother sending it.’ That’s what I hope he does. I think that’s what he does,” Brown said.

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he accepted why the deal was struck and why the president and some Senate Democrats supported it. But he also took the unusual move of openly opposing the bill, well before it even came to the House for a vote.

“Look, nobody wants to shut down the government. Nobody sees it as a positive to go to a three-month CR. That’s understandable. On the other hand, there are very onerous provisions which will hurt working people,” he said.

Sanders, who may run as the most liberal presidential candidate of 2016, said he hoped that there would be less concessions in the future, though, which is going to take a big push from Obama — and a lot more coordination with Democrats in the future.

“We have to work together. The White House plays a very, very important role: Make it clear the president will veto any effort to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, nutrition,” Sanders said. “The president has got to be a real strong leader on this.”

Seung Min Kim and Rachael Bade contributed to this report.

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