The failure of the Senate Appropriations and Spending Reform bill to Avert a Government Shutdown: A Press conference report from the House on Saturday
The federal government was barely averted on Saturday as the House approved a stopgap plan to keep it open. After Senate passage, President Biden signed the bill shortly before midnight.
The failure is the latest display of the dysfunction that has engulfed Congress in the days and weeks leading up to an increasingly inevitable government shutdown. House Republicans have been mired in internal battles over spending and political tactics that have put them at odds with Democrats and most Republicans in the Senate.
The Senate is working on its own bipartisan bill to avert any shutdown, but still has procedural steps to get through and the chamber may not vote before a shutdown begins.
McCarthy used the press conference before the vote to downplay the internal divisions within the party and dared Republicans to block it. Every member will have to keep a record of where they are. If they want to secure the border or vote against a measure to keep the government open, what should they do?
But going into the vote there were already a block of hardliners who said they wouldn’t approve any short term bill, many of them demanding that Congress complete action on all 12 spending bills. The vote was 199-199, with 21 GOP members voting against it.
The stopgap bill, known as a continuing resolution, was refused support by Republicans because it kept funding where it was last year.
During the debate on the bill, McGovern noted that the White House had already issued a veto threat, and it was a waste of time.
The GOP bill slashed spending by 30 percent despite the fact that current spending levels for all agencies remain the same.
“This bill would slash investments in cancer research, leave communities recovering from natural disasters out to dry, undercut allies with a $1 billion cut to Israel and further cuts to our support of Ukraine, defund law enforcement and makes our communities less safe, and take food out of the mouths of millions. The bill raises costs at a time when the cost of living is already too high, according to the top Democrat on the House Appropriations bill.
The fate of the bill in the Senate is unclear, in part because the the Senate was scheduled to vote to advance its own bipartisan bill that funded the government at roughly the same time as the House.
An amendment to the Senate bill that would address border security was put together by Senate Republicans and Sinema in order to make it more attractive to the GOP House. It’s not clear if their efforts will be enough to get support from the Senate Democrats. Conservative House Republicans are opposed to including an additional aide for Ukraine.
A group of House Republicans and Democrats have been meeting to push a bipartisan plan in the event of a shutdown, many of them representing swing districts across the country, and warning about the negative impact of any shutdown.
The situation could pose problems for Mr. McCarthy, who had been threatened with removal from the speakership if he worked together with Democrats to keep the government open.
House G.O.P. leaders emerged from a more than two-hour closed-door meeting held after the vote without a clear path forward to avert a shutdown. The same strategy that led to Mr. McCarthy’s downfall was used to try to get conservatives to vote for stopgap funding legislation, promising more time to pass individual spending bills.
The Republicans retired without knowing what they would have to do on Saturday in order to keep the government open. A 14-day stopgap bill was one possibility for Republicans that was not very clear if it could pass.
Republicans came out of the meeting “all over the map,” said Representative Steve Womack, Republican of Arkansas and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee. He thought that the bipartisan stopgap plan in the Senate would be the only thing that House Republicans would consider if they could not pass a funding bridge of their own.
The House voted 335 to 91 in favor of a 45 day extension of federal funding. The fate of the bill in the Senate remains unclear, though the broad bipartisan support in the House puts pressure on senators to accept the stopgap and avoid a shutdown.
The House vote was delayed after Mr. McCarthy asked Republicans and Democrats alike to put their partisan disagreements behind them. Focus on the American public.
The analysis was prepared by the House Appropriations Committee’s Democratic staff and criticized the bill for not including money for Ukranian.
Johnson pointed out that the speaker moved to this plan due to the 21 Republicans who blocked the GOP bill on Friday. Those members gave us a chance to pass something a little less conservative. Now the good news is this is still a pathway to get the kind of conservative wins we need through the appropriations process.”
House Republican leaders canceled the planned district recess for the beginning of October and said the House will continue to move their own spending bills — they passed four of the 12 that fund federal agencies.
McCarthy’s move opens him up to a challenge for his gavel. Gaetz has been suggesting for days that he was about to file a resolution to oust the speaker. Under rules McCarthy agreed to in January when he was elected, only one lawmaker is needed to file a “motion to vacate” — a resolution that calls for a vote of confidence in the speaker.
The speaker told reporters if someone tried to remove him because he wanted to be an adult in the room, go ahead and do it.
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Democrats complained that McCarthy had sprung the plan on them and that he was trying to push through a 71-page measure without proper scrutiny. But they also did not want to be accused of putting the U.S. aid to Ukraine ahead of keeping government agencies open and paying two million members of the military and 1.5 million federal employees.
“Are you telling me you would shut down the government if there is not Ukraine funding?” The Republicans asked Democrats on the House floor.
After the vote, the House adjourned, meaning the Senate had to take up the legislation or be blamed for a shut down since there isn’t any time for the House to consider additional legislation before Monday.
“The American people can breathe a sigh of relief: there will be no government shutdown,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, after the Senate vote closed about three hours before the deadline. “After trying to take our government hostage, MAGA Republicans won nothing.”
Mr. Biden said that was good news for the American people. He added, “I fully expect the speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment.”
Although members of both parties said they would win money for Ukraine in the weeks to come, the bill failed to provide any money due to Republican opposition to additional funding for Kyiv.
The fight over funding the war effort in Ukraine came on the heels of Zelensky’s visit to Washington last month to make the case for continued U.S. support. Congress has approved about $113 billion in military, humanitarian and economic aid in four packages since the invasion by Russia, and Mr. Biden has requested another $24 billion.
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A much larger contingent of Republicans also refused to back the measure, which also left out severe immigration restrictions many of them had demanded.
He said before the vote he was prepared to risk a challenge to his job to get the bill passed that would keep the government open.
Democrats celebrated the outcome. “Extreme MAGA Republicans have lost,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said as he walked to the House floor to vote in favor of the bill. The people of the US have won.
The day on Capitol Hill was a roller coaster. Cannon House Office Building was forced to evacuate as fire alarms rang out as House Democrats tried to stall Mr. McCarthy’s plan on the floor. It was later determined that Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, had triggered the alarm, though he claimed it was inadvertent.
A wave of asylum seekers crossing the southern border has House Republicans demanding deep spending cuts, a cutoff of aid toUkraine, and immigration restrictions in exchange for a deal. Both parties think Congress should follow higher funding levels established in a deal that President Biden has with Mr. McCarthy.
Before the sudden turn of events on Saturday, federal agencies were bracing to close if no stopgap were enacted. The armed forces and other so-called essential workers such as air traffic controllers and airport security workers would have remained on the job but without pay until the standoff was resolved. The food and medical assistance to millions of low-income mothers and children would have been in jeopardy.