Disastrous spending bill debate now involves literal disaster relief

Lawmakers are hoping for relief from this entire spending bill disaster.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said on Thursday that the stopgap spending measure that Congress is desperately trying to tweak to appease President Trump will include increased funding for disaster relief, CNN's Manu Raju reports.

Though the Senate on Wednesday passed a spending bill that would continue current funding through February, the House is struggling to strike a balance between Trump's insistence that the government shut down unless Congress agrees to spend $5 billion on his promised border wall and Democrats' refusal to put money toward anything other than general "border security."

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House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), after an emergency meeting with the president, emerged and told reporters that Trump would not sign any bill that didn't spend enough on a wall. Scalise announced that House Republicans will move to add an amendment to the bill that would include $5 billion for the wall, which Raju says may not pass in the House and "has NO chance" in the Senate. The amendment would also provide $8 billion in disaster relief.

While perhaps the addition was meant to shore up the bill's tepid popularity, it didn't appear to immediately work. Improved disaster relief is a bipartisan issue, but Trump's border wall is certainly not — Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) told reporters the added disaster relief funding didn't change his mind about what he really wanted in a spending bill, namely a larger immigration compromise.