WASHINGTON (AP) – Facing a government shutdown deadline, the Senate early Saturday rushed through final passage of a bipartisan plan to temporarily fund federal government operations and disaster relief and raise the debt ceiling. President-elect Donald Trump’s request for a new government has been postponed until the new year.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had insisted Congress would “do its duty” and not allow federal operations to shut down ahead of the Christmas holiday season. But the day’s outcome was uncertain as President Trump doubled down on his insistence that any deal would include raising the debt ceiling. If not, the shutdown “starts now,” he said in an early morning post.
The House of Commons approved Johnson’s new bill by an overwhelming vote of 366 to 34. The Senate worked late into the night and passed it 85-11 shortly after the deadline. The White House announced late at night that preparations for the shutdown had been halted.
“This is a good result for the country,” Johnson said after the House of Commons vote, adding that he had spoken to President Trump and that the president-elect was “certainly pleased with the result.”
President Joe Biden was scheduled to sign the bill on Saturday, although he has not played much of a public role in the process throughout a tumultuous week.
“There will be no government shutdown,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
The final product was the third attempt by embattled House Speaker Johnson to accomplish one of the federal government’s fundamental requirements: staying open. And this raises questions about whether Mr. Johnson can continue to defend his job in the face of angry Republican colleagues and work with Mr. Trump and billionaire ally Elon Musk, who has called for legislative action from afar. It raised tough questions.
President Trump’s last-minute request was a near-impossible one, leaving Johnson with little choice but to avoid pressure to raise the debt ceiling. Because many Republican deficit hawks prefer to cut the federal government and simply cannot tolerate more debt, the Speaker is confident that he will not have enough support within the Republican majority to pass a funding measure. I knew.
Instead, Republicans will take full control of the White House, House and Senate next year, with big plans for tax cuts and other priorities, but Democrats won’t have the votes needed to maintain day-to-day operations. This indicates that there is a need to rely on of governance.
“So is this a Republican bill or a Democratic bill?” mocked Musk on social media before the vote.
The significantly slimmed-down 118-page package funds the government at current levels through March 14, adding $100 billion in disaster relief and $10 billion in agricultural aid to farmers. .
Gone is President Trump’s call to raise the debt ceiling, which Republican leaders said would be discussed as part of tax and border policy in the new year. At the time, Republicans struck a so-called handshake deal that would raise the debt ceiling while cutting spending by $2.5 trillion over 10 years.
This is essentially the same deal the previous night, minus President Trump’s debt ceiling demands, that failed massively due to opposition from most Democrats and some of the most conservative Republicans.
But it’s much smaller than the original bipartisan agreement Mr. Johnson struck with Democratic and Republican leaders, a 1,500-page bill that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk vetoed and had to start over. The bill was packed with a long list of other bills, including a much-derided pay raise for lawmakers, but now others with broad bipartisan support have a tougher path to passage. The bill was also included.
House Democrats were cool about the effort after Johnson abandoned a hard-fought bipartisan compromise.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said Musk, the world’s richest man, appears to be calling the shots for Trump and the Republican Party.
“Who is in charge?” she asked during the debate.
Still, House Democrats voted more to pass the bill than Republicans. About 30 conservative House Republicans voted against it.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, referring to President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, said, “House Democrats want to make sure that extreme MAGA Republicans are shutting down the government, collapsing the economy, and threatening workers across America.” “We succeeded in stopping it from harming a class of Americans.”
In the Senate, nearly all opposition came from Republicans, with the exception of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said Musk’s intervention was “an oligarchy, not a democracy.”
Mr. Trump, who has not yet taken office as president, intervenes and coordinates political affairs from Mar-a-Lago with Mr. Musk, who heads the new Department of Government Efficiency, so his influence on Congress is both strong and limited. It shows. .
The incoming Trump administration has vowed to cut the federal budget and lay off thousands of employees, and is looking to Republicans for a major tax cut. And President Trump isn’t as afraid of a shutdown as some members of Congress, having caused the longest government shutdown in history during his first term in the White House.
“If there’s going to be a government shutdown, let’s start it now,” President Trump posted on social media early in the morning.
More important to the president-elect was his demand to get the thorny debt ceiling debate off the table before returning to the White House. The federal debt ceiling is set to expire on January 1, but President Trump does not want to spend the first months of his new administration busy negotiating tough negotiations in Congress to increase the nation’s borrowing capacity. Johnson is now doing everything he can to achieve that result.
“Congress needs to either repeal the ridiculous debt ceiling or maybe extend it until 2029,” Trump tweeted, pushing for a new five-year debt ceiling increase. “If you don’t have this, you should never close a deal.”
Government officials had already been told to prepare for a federal government shutdown and for millions of employees and military personnel to go into the holiday season without pay.
Biden has been consulting with Jeffries and Schumer, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “Republicans have ruined this deal. They did that and we need to fix this.” there is.”
As the days wore on, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell intervened, reminding his colleagues of how harmful it is to shut down the government and how foolish it is to bet that your side won’t be responsible for it. “Is that so?” he reminded her.
At one point, during a lunchtime meeting, Johnson asked House Republicans to raise their hands as they sought to choose a path forward.
It wasn’t just shut down, the speaker’s job was on the line. The speaker’s election is the first vote of the new Congress, which will convene on January 3, and some Trump supporters are recommending Musk to be speaker.
Johnson said he spoke with Musk ahead of Friday’s vote and discussed the “extraordinary challenges of this job.”
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