Dem Dems Like McCarthy? Democrats Need a Veto to Block a Bipartisan Senate Spending Measure to End a Government Shutdown

Republicans were back to the drawing board after the House’s failure to pass a bill for a government shutdown. Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, told reporters he had “other ideas” on how to keep government funding flowing and that he would keep working to “make sure we solve this problem.” House leaders alerted lawmakers that more votes were expected on Saturday.

Congress has been in a mess in the days and weeks leading up to the government shutting down. House Republicans are at odds with their own party in the Senate because of battles over spending and political tactics.

The Senate is working on its own bipartisan bill to stop a government shutdown, but there are still some procedural steps that need to be taken before it can vote.

At a press conference before the vote McCarthy downplayed internal divisions and essentially dared fellow Republicans to follow through on their threat to block it. Everyone will be required to go on record where they are. Will they vote against a measure to keep the government open or will they side with President Biden and secure the border?

There were already a group of hardliners in congress who said they wouldn’t approve any short term bills unless there was action on the 12 spending bills. 21 GOP members voted against it.

Republican holdouts were unmoved. Their argument all along has been that Congress should have their work writing spending bills, not pass stop gaps. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., repeated his stance ahead of the vote.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., noted the White House already issued a veto threat on the GOP bill, stating during the floor debate, “this is a complete waste of time.”

Democrats denounced the steep spending cuts in the GOP bill, instead of keeping current spending levels for all agencies, the measure walled off a few departments, but slashed others by 30 percent.

The bill would leave communities recovering from natural disasters out to dry, cut support to our allies and make our communities less safe and deprived of food, and it would further cut investments in cancer research. The cost of living is already too high and this bill raises costs on American families,” said the top Democrat in the House.

The Senate’s spending bill would fund government agencies through November 17. $7 billion is for disaster aid and $3 billion is for assistance for Ukraine. McCarthy opposed pairing additional money for Ukraine on a stopgap bill, and argued Congress needed to address the situation at the southwest border.

A group of Senate Republicans and Independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are working on an amendment to the Senate bill that would address border security, in an attempt to make it more palatable to the GOP House. It’s unclear whether their efforts will yield a proposal that will get support from Senate Democrats. Some conservative House Republicans are against including an additional aide for Ukraine.

A group of House Republicans and Democrats have been meeting to discuss a plan in the event of a government shutdown, and many of them are from swing districts that will be affected by a shutdown.

But the loss also made clear that Mr. McCarthy faces almost impossible odds of getting a stopgap funding bill through with votes from his own party alone, and that the simplest way to avert a shutdown would be for him to work with Democrats on a compromise measure. His detractors have warned that he would be removed from the speakership.

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 was used that led to Mr. McCarthy’s downfall, namely trying to get conservatives to vote for stopgap funding legislation by promising that it would give lawmakers more time to pass individual spending bills.

With a shutdown just a day away, House Republicans retired for the evening without a clear idea of what, if anything, they would be asked to support on the floor on Saturday. A bare-bones 14-day stopgap bill emerged as one possibility for Republicans, though it was far from 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. If the Republicans couldn’t pass a bridge of their own, he predicted that they would have to consider the stopgap plan in the Senate.