House sends short-term funding measure to Senate in bid to avoid government shutdown.
The House of Representatives approved a stopgap funding bill that will avert a government shutdown at midnight tonight if adopted by the Senate and signed by President Joe Biden.
The bill extends federal funding at the current rate for 45 days. It also includes money for disaster relief and a reauthorization of FAA funding. While the bill continues existing support for Ukraine, it does not include additional funding for that war effort, which Democrats and some Republicans favor.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) pleaded for more time to consider the 70-page continuing resolution (CR), which he said was presented just minutes ahead of a proposed vote and mere hours ahead of a potential government shutdown.
Yet 209 Democrats, including Mr. Jeffries, joined the effort to reach the two-thirds majority needed to pass the bill under a suspension of House rules. The final tally was 335–91.
Republicans successfully argued that the bill represented a fair effort to keep the government operating at full capacity beyond midnight tonight when the fiscal year expires and the government’s spending authority with it.
Ninety Republicans opposed the bill, more than quadruple the 21 who joined Democrats in defeating a more conservative CR presented by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) the previous day.
That left Republican leaders scrambling to come up with some measure that would avoid a government shutdown on Republican terms.
Mr. McCarthy celebrated the passage of the CR but acknowledged that it was not the solution he had preferred.
“Would I have wanted the bill we put on the floor yesterday, that would secure our border and cut wasteful spending? Yes, I did. But I had some members in our own conference that wouldn’t vote for that,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters shortly after the vote.
“At the end of the day, we kept the government open, kept paying our troops to finish the job we have to get done,” he added.
