With another government shutdown looming, on Friday the House of Representatives approved an emergency budget with only 12 hours to go. The bill passed by a vote of 335 to 91.
A government shutdown seemed inevitable headed into Saturday. The Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives, leaving a small group of far-right politicians with outsized influence on the House and on House speaker Kevin McCarthy. (In case you missed it, Rep. McCarthy made a series of promises to his Republican colleagues in exchange for them finally handing him the speakership after the 15th vote). One of McCarthy’s hopes for appeasing Republicans was to announce an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden (though the inquiry is “based on pretty shaky evidence,” host Michael Barbaro said on the New York Times’s The Daily), but even that concession didn’t work. A government shutdown seemed all but certain when Rep. McCarthy urged, “Republicans and Democrats alike, put your partisanship away, focus on the American public.” The final tally included 209 Democrats supporting the stopgap spending bill and 126 Republicans doing the same.
The Senate passed the stopgap with a vote of 88-9 (all nine dissenting votes were from Republicans). President Biden then signed the budget, which NPR reported “includes $16 billion in emergency disaster assistance requested by the White House,” but “does not include any additional aid to Ukraine, despite widespread bipartisan support for that funding in the Senate.”
As of Saturday night, with just hours to spare, a government shutdown had been avoided – though the stopgap will last for only 45 days, possibly setting up a Groundhog Day situation, but for now, Democrats are celebrating and government employees will not have their paychecks disrupted. AOC tweeted to sum it up: “Here’s what went down: we just won a clean 45 day gov extension, stripped GOP’s earlier 30% cuts to Social Security admin etc, staved off last minute anti-immigrant hijinks, and averted shutdown (for now). People will get paychecks and MTG threw a tantrum on the way out. Win-win.”
Seemingly in response to McCarthy reaching across the aisle to pass the stopgap resolution, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R – FL.) announced he will be filing a “motion to vacate” this week to remove McCarthy as speaker. “I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” Gaetz said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “Look, the one thing everybody has in common is that nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy.” The motion to vacate was one of several concessions McCarthy made to hardline Republicans in exchange for their votes in favor of his speakership. According to the motion, any Republican House member can advance a resolution to remove him as speaker. Without the concession of the motion to vacate, McCarthy may not have become speaker – but he also may have handed Republicans the tool to end his speakership.
Since we might be discussing this again in just 45 days, this is what happens if the government gets shut down: Many government operations would stop and millions of federal employees and military service members would not be paid (though, notably, Congress would still be paid). According to CNN, a government shutdown could result in airport delays, museum closures, the closure of immigration courts, a disruption to WIC funding, and the halting of construction work across the country, in addition to many other changes.
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