The Senate took up a bill Saturday to extend government funding for 45 days, with just hours left to send the legislation to Joe Biden’s desk and avoid a federal shutdown.
Just before the vote, the Senate majority leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer, said that he expected the legislation to pass with bipartisan support.
“Democrats and Republicans have come to an agreement, and the government will remain open,” Schumer said in a floor speech. “Bipartisanship, which has been the trademark of the Senate. has prevailed, and the American people can breathe a sigh of relief.”
The Senate vote came hours after the proposal passed the House in an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 335 to 91, with 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in supporting the legislation. Ninety House Republicans opposed the bill.
The bill – unveiled by the House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, on Saturday morning – will extend funding through 17 November and allocate $16bn for disaster aid. The bill does not include additional funding for Ukraine, which has become a source of outrage among hard-right lawmakers.
At the last minute, Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat of Colorado, threatened to block the bill’s advancement because of its lack of Ukraine funding. But leaders of both parties promised that Congress would soon take up a supplemental funding bill to provide additional financial assistance to Ukraine.
“I’m confident the senator will pass further urgent assistance to Ukraine later this year,” said Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. “But let’s be clear: the alternative to our action today, an entirely avoidable government shutdown, would not just pause our progress on these important priorities. It would actually set them back.”
McCarthy introduced the stopgap bill under suspension of the rules, meaning he needed the support of two-thirds of House members to advance the proposal. Although House Democrats also criticized the bill’s lack of Ukraine funding, they ultimately provided McCarthy with the support needed to get the legislation across the finish line.
Speaking after the vote, McCarthy expressed disappointment that a large share of his conference opposed the bill, but he said the intransigence displayed by hard-right Republicans left him with no other option.
“It is very clear that I tried every possible way, listening to every single person in the conference,” McCarthy told reporters. “If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.”
The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, celebrated the bill’s passage, saying: “[‘Make America Great Again’] Republicans have surrendered. All extreme rightwing policies have been removed from the House spending bill. The American people have won.”
Prior to the House vote, the Senate had planned to hold a vote Saturday on a separate stopgap spending bill, which also would have kept the government open until 17 November and provided some funding for Ukraine’s war efforts as well as disaster relief aid.
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But the Senate instead reoriented their efforts toward advancing McCarthy’s bill after the proposal passed the House. Although Senate Democrats voiced displeasure about the lack of Ukraine funding, the House bill represented their only option to prevent a shutdown. Because of procedural hurdles, the Senate could not hold a final vote on its own bill until Sunday at the earliest, when a shutdown would have already started.
The rare weekend session came one day after the House failed to pass McCarthy’s initial stopgap bill, which would have extended government funding for another month while enacting steep spending cuts on most federal agencies.
McCarthy’s proposal was rejected by 21 House Republicans, as hard-right members continued to insist they would not support a continuing resolution. Hard-right Republicans threatened to oust the speaker if he teamed up with Democrats to keep the government open, a viable threat when it only takes one member to introduce a motion to vacate the chair. Despite the criticism from his hard-right colleagues, McCarthy downplayed threats to his speakership on Saturday.
“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it,” McCarthy told reporters. “There has to be an adult in the room. I am going to govern with what is best for this country.”
Biden was expected to sign the bill as soon as it reaches his desk to meet the midnight deadline to avoid a shutdown. The White House had warned that a shutdown would force hundreds of thousands of government workers to go without pay, jeopardize access to vital nutritional programs and delay disaster relief projects.
It looks like the country will be able to avoid that fate – for now, at least.
