US VS. THEM:

President Barack Obama combined forces with opposition Republicans to win a narrow budget victory in the House of Representatives Thursday night, but it came at a high political cost because he alienated many liberals who opposed parts of measure.

The House Thursday night passed a $1 trillion spending bill that averts a shutdown and funds the vast majority of the government for the next year.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) was on the losing side of the ledger. But she made her point.

[S]ince Democratic votes were needed to pass the budget, there must have been some goodies tossed in there for the liberals, too. Right?

Actually, not really.

But before we get to that, here's a list of some things in the bill that will warm conservative hearts (you can read about more here):

Wall Street's derivatives trading provision

A rule allowing donors to give ten times as much to political parties

A block on DC's marijuana legalization

A loosening of nutrition requirements for school lunches (take that, Michelle Obama!)

A series of anti-environmental riders, including barring funds to help developing countries cut carbon emissions

A large cut to the EPA budget; staffing at the agency will be reduced to its lowest level since 1989

A provision blocking the EPA from applying the Clean Water Act to certain kinds of farms

A large cut to the IRS budget

A cut to the Affordable Care Act's Independent Payment Advisory Board

A cut to the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC), and a requirement that the program's nutrition vouchers can be used to buy potatoes (inserted at the behest of the potato lobby)

An elimination of funding for Obama's Race to the Top education initiative

That's a lot that conservatives can be happy about. So what about liberals? In the press briefing White House spokesperson Josh Earnest held yesterday, he tried to explain what the White House was getting out of the deal. He noted that they got the funding to combat Ebola that they wanted, which is good, but it isn't exactly an item off the liberal wish list. He mentioned money to fight ISIL--again, something the White House wants, but not a treat for the left. Then pretty much everything else he cited was the absence of cuts to important programs, or cuts that weren't as large as they might have been.

In other words, the Republicans got a bunch of things they wanted, while Democrats avoided getting too much taken away from them. It's as though two kids showed up at your door on Halloween, and you dropped a handful of Twix bars into Superman's bag, but told Princess Elsa, "Your treat is that I'm not going to reach into your bag and take those KitKats."

The differences between many in the party and the president were on full display in the spending fight, as House Democrats played hardball on a $1.1 trillion omnibus must-pass bill despite the White House publicly backing it and calling for bipartisan compromise.

And on other issues -- including the nomination of an investment banker to a Treasury Department post, a tax package negotiated by the Senate's top Democrats, and Mr. Obama's stated determination to push two major free trade deals in the final year of his administration -- have caused unusually public rifts between the administration and Capitol Hill.

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