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Senate of Pennsylvania
SENATE DEMOCRATIC WRAP-UP FOR
THE WEEK OF |
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Following several hours of contentious debate, the Senate voted 31 to 19 this week in favor of a $27.1 billion spending plan for fiscal 2009-10. With the state’s budget impasse dragging into late July, Senate Republicans amended the House Democratic-sponsored version of House Bill 1416 with a spending plan that would largely fill the state’s burgeoning $3.3 billion budget deficit by making sharp cuts to a number of state services and programs. Democrats criticized majority Republicans for making drastic cuts to education, health care and hospitals, programs that help vulnerable citizens, economic development programs and imperiling billion in federal stimulus dollars. Republicans countered that the proposed House Democratic spending plan was unbalanced because it had defunded higher education by $1.3 billion. The House quickly non-concurred in House Bill 1416 by a vote of 150 to 49. The bill then bounced back to the Senate where the Senate voted to insist on its amendments, spurring the formation of a conference committee to iron out differences.
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