After a long day on Capitol Hill, a government shutdown was averted with hours to go before the funding deadline.
The House passed a 45-day continuing resolution on Saturday. Previously, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) claimed that the House would not even consider a continuing resolution (CR).
Multiple attempts to bring up a bill have failed during the last week, with some Republicans objecting because they opposed committing funding to Ukraine.
Ultimately, the House voted on what is known as a clean bill, which is stripped of all extra-budgetary measures except the bare bones. The House did include funding for disaster relief, but most of the extra money had been stripped out.
The GOP-led plan was introduced Saturday morning, and the House attempted to vote on the bill immediately without any time to actually read the bill.
On X, formerly known as Twitter, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said, “Republicans just called a vote that starts in minutes on a bill they haven’t actually shared.”
Democrats tried to stall the vote in order to read the bill and understand it. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) pulled a fire alarm inside the House before voting started, though he claims it was an accident.
The bill did pass the House in a 335-91 bipartisan vote. From there, it moved to the Senate.
Initially slated to vote at 6:30 p.m. EST, the bill was delayed for over two hours. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) did not support the bill because there was no guarantee for aid to Ukraine.
However, both party leaders convinced him to stop holding up the vote, and the Senate passed the bill in an 88-9 vote.
The government has now passed a budget but just avoided a shutdown temporarily. This CR was a 45-day stopgap measure, meaning that this temporary funding will expire again on Nov. 17.
Until then, Congress will continue to negotiate a new budget, and the government will remain open.
