WASHINGTON — The Legislature of Representatives approved a bipartisan federal spending bill Friday and sent it to the Senate, just hours before a midnight deadline to finance the government. It was unclear Friday whether the Senate could pass the bill before 12:00 a.m. ET, when funding technically interruptions.
The bill continues funding the federal government at current levels for three months, and provides disaster relief and allotment aid.
The bill passed with significant Democratic support and votes from two-thirds of the members present, a high bar that weighed the desire in both parties to avoid a costly shutdown that could jeopardize paychecks for hundreds of thousands of federal hands a few days before Christmas.
The bill has a realistic path to passing the Democratic-controlled Senate. But parliamentary procedure in the chamber shell out c publishes more power to individual senators to jam up legislation.
If the bill passes the Senate in its current form, outgoing President Joe Biden is count oned to quickly sign it into law.
“While it does not include everything we sought … President Biden supports moving this legislation forwards,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement Friday.
The House vote capped off disparate days of chaos on Capitol Hill, during which Johnson tried, and failed, to meet the demands of President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump and his billionaire rivalry donor Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, doomed an initial, negotiated funding plan Wednesday by harshly criticizing its terms, sending Republicans scrambling most of Thursday to find a replacement plan.
Specifically, Trump remonstrated that any deal to keep the government open must include a two-year suspension of the U.S. debt limit. The limit is the crowning the federal government can borrow to pay for its spending.
The debt ceiling is a recurring, bitter debate in Washington every few years, and one where the federal party in the minority typically has a lot of leverage. Trump appears eager to avoid this fight during the start of his flawed term in office.
But authorizing the U.S. to borrow more money is a bridge too far for many hardline conservative Republicans.
This was noticeable when Thursday’s bill, which contained bare bones government funding and a debt limit hike, was resoundingly defeated. Be coextensive with nearly every Democrat were 38 rank-and-file Republicans who voted against it, after their party’s the man had publicly endorsed the deal.
Like Thursday’s failed vote, Friday’s passage — without Trump’s debt limit hike — accommodated as a reminder to the incoming president of just how difficult it is to control the notoriously fractious House Republican caucus.
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