Government shutdown averted as Senate sends Biden funding bill: Live

Congress was able to pass a temporary funding bill on Tuesday to temporarily avoid a government shutdown, with a large volume of Democrats helping Speaker Mike Johnson get the proposal over the finish line in the House.

“From the very beginning of the Congress, House Democrats have made clear that we will always put people over politics and try to find common ground with our Republican colleagues wherever possbile, while pushing back against Republican extremism whenever necessary,” Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement going into the vote.

“The continuing resolution before the House today meets that criteria and we will support it.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer offered measured praise on Tuesday of the House’s recently passed spending bill to avoid a government shutdown.

“Both of us agreed, the White House and myself, that if this can avoid a shutdown, it will be a good thing,” he told The New York Times.

He added he hopes to see the House bill get a vote in the Senate “as soon as possible.”

What’s it like being House Speaker at this contentious moment in US history? Well, sounds like there might be some more appealing jobs out there, at least according to Mike Johnson.

“I’ve been drinking from Niagara Falls for the last three weeks,” he told reporters on Tuesday of the recent spending bill. “This will allow everybody to go home for a couple of days for Thanksgiving, everybody cool off — members have been here for, as [House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.)] said, for 10 weeks, this place is a pressure cooker. And so I think everybody can go home, we can come back, reset, we’re gonna get our group together, we’re gonna map out that plan to fight for those principles.”

Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said he remained concerned about the two-part approach. Veteran lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called it cumbersome, unusual and unworkable.

Nevertheless, Jeffries in a letter to Democratic colleagues noted that the GOP package met the Democratic demands to keep funding at current levels without steep reductions or divisive Republican policy priorities.

“Extreme MAGA Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated that they cannot govern without House Democrats,” Jeffries said on NPR. “That will be the case this week in the context of avoiding a government shutdown.”

With the House narrowly divided, Johnson could not afford many defections from his Republicans, which is forcing him into the arms of Democrats.

Winning bipartisan approval of a continuing resolution is the same move that led McCarthy’s hard-right flank to oust him in October, days after the Sept. 30 vote to avert a federal shutdown. For now, Johnson appears to be benefiting from a political honeymoon in one of his first big tests on the job.

“Look, we’re going to trust the speaker’s move here,” said Rep. Drew Ferguson, R-Ga.

But Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a McCarthy ally who opposed his ouster, said Johnson should be held to the same standard. “What’s the point in throwing out one speaker if nothing changes? The only way to make sure that real changes happen is make the red line stay the same for every speaker.”

The Senate, where Democrats have a slim majority, has signaled its willingness to accept Johnson’s package ahead of Friday’s deadline to fund the government.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called the House package “a solution” and said he expected it to pass Congress with bipartisan support.

“It’s nice to see us working together to avoid a government shutdown,” he said.

But McConnell, R-Ky., has noted that Congress still has work to do toward Biden’s request to provide U.S. military aid for Ukraine and Israel and for other needs. Senators are trying to devise a separate package to fund U.S. supplies for the overseas wars and to bolster border security, but it remains a work in progress.

If approved, passage of the continuing resolution would be a less-than-triumphant capstone to the House GOP’s first year in the majority. The Republicans have worked tirelessly to cut federal government spending only to find their own GOP colleagues are unwilling to go along with the most conservative priorities. Two of the Republican bills collapsed last week as moderates revolted.

Instead, the Republicans are left funding the government essentially on autopilot at the levels that were set in bipartisan fashion at the end of 2022, when Democrats had control of Congress but the two parties came together to agree on budget terms.

All that could change in the new year when 1% cuts across the board to all departments would be triggered if Congress failed to agree to new budget terms and pass the traditional appropriation bills to fund the government by springtime.

The 1% automatic cuts, which would take hold in April, are despised by all sides — Republicans say they are not enough, Democrats say they are too steep and many lawmakers prefer to boost defense funds. But they are part of the debt deal McCarthy and Biden struck earlier this year. The idea was to push Congress to do better.

Congress is poised to finally avert a government shutdown before the holidays and buy itself some time for negotiations. But it will literally do so kicking and screaming.

On Tuesday, both chambers of Congress saw tensions run high, with members nearly coming to blows.

The tension began when, as Claudia Grisales of NPR reported, former House speaker Kevin McCarthy walked past Rep Tim Burchett (R-TN) and shoved him. That led to Mr Burchett, a normally mild-mannered Republican whose drawl resembles Huckleberry Hound, chasing the disgraced former speaker and then lunging at him before getting into an apparent scuffle.

That apparently led to Mr McCarthy denying that he elbowed Mr Burchett, and Mr Burchett saying, “You got no guts, you did so.”

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Reps Tim Burchett and Kevin McCarthy have a tumultuous relationship. At the beginning of this year, Mr Burchett backed Mr McCarthy for speaker. And in the wee hours of 7 January, as a fight nearly broke out on the House floor, he told Rep Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to call off the dogs to allow Mr McCarthy to become speaker.

But to borrow from Taylor Swift, that mad love turned to bad blood in October after the House passed a clean stopgap spending bill without spending cuts. When Mr Burchett told reporters he would have to pray about whether to join Mr Gaetz in ejecting Mr McCarthy, the then-speaker reportedly mocked Mr Burchett, which pushed the gentleman from Tennessee over the limit and led to Mr Burchett voting to oust the speaker.

Judging by Tuesday’s exchange, the two will not reconcile anytime soon. And just to twist the knife a little bit more, Mr Gaetz announced he would file an ethics complaint against his former nemesis Mr McCarthy. Reminder, Mr Gaetz is still the subject of an ongoing Ethics Committee investigation himself.

Senate Republicans got the memo that it was fight club day on the Hill.

Back in July, during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, Sen Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), a former MMA fighter, had a testy exchange with Sean O’Brien, the head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. During a HELP hearing on Tuesday, Mr Mullin read a tweet from Mr O’Brien challenging him to a fight “Anyplace. Anytime, cowboy.”

In turn, both men proceeded to stand up before Sen Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the committee, admonished both of them. When I asked Mr Sanders about the incident, he said simply, “Well, I know that you’re very interested in the important issues facing America.”

During a hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Chairman James Comer and Rep Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), who frequently mocks the GOP’s attempts to impeach President Joe Biden with acerbic wit, had a testy exchange. At one point the chairman mocked Rep Dan Goldman (D-NY), as “Mr Trust Fund” for being the heir to the Levi’s fortune and said of Mr Moskowitz, “you look like a Smurf.”

All this tension is the result of Congress being forced to deal with each other for weeks on end. Doug Andres, the press secretary for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (and one of the better accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter), said: “Today is another example of why Congress shouldn’t be in session for 5 weeks straight. Weird things happen.”

But that’s just the Senate. The House, which is generally more squirrelly than the staid club of 100 that is the US Senate, has been in session for 10 weeks. In that time, it went 22 days without a speaker, wherein Republicans cycled through three candidates before agreeing to make Mike Johnson speaker of the House. Democrats, for their part, have been fighting about Israel, with 22 of them joining a Republican censure of Rep Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), for using the phrase “from the River to the Sea” to talk about Palestine.

Meanwhile, Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has taken to calling Rep Chip Roy (R-TX) Colonel Sanders, which is an Original Recipe for disaster.