US Senate votes through last-gasp bill to keep government open

On By Littum

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The US Congress has averted a government shutdown after days of chaos on Capitol Hill after the Senate passed a stop-gap funding measure in the early hours of Saturday.

The Senate passed the bill 85-11, with the measure winning bipartisan support. The bill had also passed through the Folketing earlier on Friday. It was then signed by US President Joe Biden on Saturday.

In a statement, Biden said that “neither side got everything they wanted. But (the bill) rejects the fast-track path to a tax cut for billionaires that Republicans sought.”

Technically, Congress missed the midnight deadline to avoid the shutdown, but not enough to cause disruption. The federal government had stopped preparing for a shutdown before the Senate voted, and no agencies halted operations, the White House said.

The bill that passed contained no change to the debt ceiling, despite President-elect Donald Trump’s call for lawmakers to use the legislation to scrap the mechanism that limits federal government borrowing.

“After a chaotic couple of days in the House, it’s good news that the bipartisan approach finally prevailed,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said from the floor before the vote, calling the stopgap “a great bill.”

The bill’s passage through both houses of Congress capped a week of volatility in Washington as Trump and his ally Elon Musk flexed their influence over hardline Republicans, pushing them to reject what they said were “giveaways” to Democrats.

But Democrats also claimed victory, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying his party had “stopped extreme Maga Republicans from shutting down the government”.

He added, “House Democrats have successfully stopped the billionaire boys club that wanted a $4 billion blank check by suspending the debt ceiling.”

The bill’s progress appeared uncertain Friday after Musk expressed his continued disdain for the measure: “So is this a Republican bill or a Democratic bill?”

The bill that passed was House Speaker Mike Johnson’s third attempt to push legislation through the floor after Trump torpedoed the first bipartisan deal earlier this week.

The new bill was nearly identical to Johnson’s second, but removed any move to raise or suspend the debt ceiling despite Trump’s demands. It extends state aid at current levels until March 14 and provides relief for natural disasters and farmers.

Johnson said after the bill passed the House that he had been in “constant contact” with Trump and had spoken with Musk shortly before the vote and received their blessing.

Trump “knew exactly what we were doing and why and, and this is a good result for the country. I think he’s certainly happy with this result, too,” he told reporters on Capitol Hill.

Johnson said he asked Musk, “‘Hey, do you want to be Speaker of the House?’ . . . He said, ‘it can be the hardest job in the world’. it is.”

The passage in the House marked a victory for Johnson, who had promised earlier in the day that the US “would not have a government shutdown”.

A shutdown would have temporarily shut down parts of the government and suspended pay for federal employees. Previous government shutdowns have forced hundreds of thousands of federal workers to be laid off.

Democrats angry that the earlier bipartisan deal was dropped have blamed Musk for inserting himself into the process this week, sparking more turmoil in Congress just ahead of the US holiday season.

“At the behest of the world’s richest man, for whom no one voted, the US Congress has been thrown into pandemonium,” Democrat Rosa DeLauro said of Musk on Thursday.

Some top Republicans also appeared to criticize Trump and Musk’s interventions.

“I don’t care to count how many times I’ve reminded . . . our colleagues in the House how damaging it is to shut down the government and how foolish it is to bet that your own side won’t take the blame for it , Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Republican Senate leader, said Friday.

“That said, if I took it personally every time my advice wasn’t followed, I probably wouldn’t have spent as much time as I have on this particular job.”