Unlock the White House Watch newsletter without cost
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
The US Congress has averted a government shutdown following days of chaos on Capitol Hill, after the Senate passed a stop-gap funding measure within the early hours of Saturday.
The Senate passed the bill 85-11, with the measure winning support from each parties. The bill also passed through the House earlier on Friday and is now headed to US President Joe Biden, who will sign it into law in a while Saturday, based on the White House.
Technically Congress missed the midnight deadline to go off the shutdown, but not by enough to cause disruption. The federal government had ceased preparing for a shutdown before the Senate voted and no agencies halted operations, the White House said.
The bill that passed didn’t include any change to the debt ceiling, despite president-elect Donald Trump’s call for lawmakers to make use of the laws to scrap the mechanism, which limits the federal government’s borrowing.
“After a chaotic few days in the home, it’s excellent news that the bipartisan approach in the long run prevailed”, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said from the ground before the vote, calling the stop-gap “a superb bill”.
Passage of the bill through the 2 chambers of Congress ended every 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 federal government”.
He added: “House Democrats have successfully stopped the billionaire boys club, which wanted a $4tn blank cheque by suspending the debt ceiling.”
The bill’s progress appeared uncertain on Friday after Musk expressed his continued disdain for the measure: “So is that this a Republican bill or a Democrat bill?”
The bill that passed was House Speaker Mike Johnson’s third try to push the laws through the chamber after Trump torpedoed the primary bipartisan agreement earlier within the week.
The brand new bill was almost equivalent to Johnson’s second one, but stripped out any move to boost or suspend the debt ceiling, despite Trump’s demands. It extends government funding at current levels through March 14, and provides aid for natural disaster relief and farmers.
Johnson said after the bill passed the House that he had been in “constant contact” with Trump and spoken to Musk shortly before the vote and received their blessing.
Trump “knew exactly what we were doing and why and, and that is a superb consequence for the country. I believe he actually is comfortable about this consequence as well”, he told reporters on Capitol Hill.
Johnson said he asked Musk: “‘Hey, you need to be Speaker of the House?’ . . . He said, ‘this will be the hardest job on this planet’. It’s.”
The passage within the House marked a victory for Johnson, who had vowed earlier within the day that the US would “not have a government shut down”.
A shutdown would have temporarily closed parts of the federal government and suspended pay for federal employees. Previous government shutdowns have forced a whole bunch of hundreds of federal employees to be furloughed.
Democrats, indignant that the sooner bipartisan deal was ditched, have blamed Musk for inserting himself in the method this week, triggering more turmoil in Congress just ahead of the US holiday season.
“On the behest of the world’s richest man who nobody voted for, the US Congress has been thrown into pandemonium,” said Democrat Rosa DeLauro about Musk on Thursday.
Some top Republicans also appeared to criticise the interventions by Trump and Musk.
“I don’t care to count how again and again I’ve reminded . . . our House counterparts how harmful it’s to shut the federal government down and how silly it is to bet your individual side won’t take the blame for it,” Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Senate Republican leader, said on Friday.
“That said, if I took it personally each time my advice went unheeded, I probably wouldn’t have spent so long as I even have on this particular job.”
