Last-gasp deal averts US government shutdown

Senate votes 88 to 9 to keep government open for another 45 days after lower house Democrats combine with Republicans to overcome a MAGA roadblock.

Democrat Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer gives the thumbs up after voting on the continuing resolution passed by the house on Saturday. Picture: AFP

The US congress has passed an 11th-hour funding bill to keep federal agencies running for another 45 days and avert a costly government shutdown, although the deal left out aid to war-torn Ukraine requested by President Joe Biden.

Three hours before the midnight Saturday deadline, the Senate voted 88 to 9 to keep the lights on through to mid-November with a resolution that had advanced earlier from the House of Representatives in a day of high-stakes brinkmanship on Capitol Hill.

As millions of public workers looked set to be sent home unpaid, upending government functions from military operations to food aid to federal policymaking, house Democrats overwhelmingly backed the “continuing resolution” pitched by Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The resolution passed the house by a vote of 335-91, with 90 Republicans voting against it.

“Tonight, bipartisan majorities in the house and Senate voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans,” Mr Biden said. But he berated Mr McCarthy and the house Republicans for reneging on spending levels agreed with the White House months ago – a major reason for the shutdown near-miss – and for stripping out support for Ukraine.

“I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment,” said the President, who was set to sign the measure into law on Sunday.

The shutdown crisis was largely triggered by a small group of hardline Republicans who had defied its own party leadership to scupper various temporary funding proposals as it pressed for deep spending cuts.

The group of 21 hardliners had threatened to remove Mr McCarthy as Speaker if a stopgap measure it opposed was passed with Democrat support, and many Washington watchers were expecting the Speaker to have to fight for his job in the coming weeks.

One of the group, Lauren Boebert, declined to say after the house vote whether she and her colleagues would try to force Mr McCarthy out, but she was clearly unhappy with the outcome.

“There are too many members here who are comfortable doing things the way they’ve been done since the mid ’90s,” she said.

“And that’s why we’re sitting at $US33 trillion in debt.”

Mr McCarthy sought to convey confidence both about his own future and the prospects for securing a final agreement within the new timeframe.

“In 45 days we should get our work all done,” he said, while seeming to offer a hand to the hardliners, saying, “I welcome those 21 back in.”

Arming and funding Kyiv in its desperate war against the Russian invasion has been a key policy plank for the Biden administration and, while the stopgap is temporary, it does raise questions over the political ­viability of renewing the multibillion-dollar flow of assistance.

Mr McCarthy said Russia’s ­invasion was “horrendous”, but insisted there could be “no blank cheque” for Ukraine. “I have a real concern of what’s going to happen long term, but I don’t want to waste any money,” he said.

If congress had failed to keep the government open, the closures would have begun just after midnight and would have delayed salaries for millions of federal employees and military personnel.

A shutdown would have meant the majority of national parks, for example – from Yosemite and Yellowstone in the west to Florida’s Everglades swamp – shutting to the public from Sunday. The stopgap measure buys legislators time to negotiate full-year spending bills for the rest of fiscal year 2024.

AFP