‘This is good news’: Biden signs stopgap funding
bill to avert US shutdown
President signed the bill hours after it was approved
in a bipartisan vote, but admonished Republicans for the delay
Joan E
Greve
@joanegreve
Sun 1 Oct
2023 04.34 BST
Joe Biden
signed a bill on Saturday to extend government funding for 45 days, averting a
federal shutdown with just an hour to spare.
Biden
praised Congress for approving the bill with bipartisan support in both
chambers, even as he criticised House Republicans for refusing to collaborate
with Democrats until the last possible minute.
“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,” Biden said in a statement.
“This is
good news for the American people. But I want to be clear: we should never have
been in this position in the first place.”
The
bill-signing came hours after the Senate approved the proposal in a bipartisan
vote of 88 to nine, easily surpassing the 60-vote threshold needed for passage.
Nine senators, all Republicans, opposed it.
“It’s been
a day full of twists and turns, but the American people can breathe a sigh of
relief – there will be no shutdown,” the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck
Schumer, said after the vote. “Our bipartisanship made this possible and showed
the House that they had to act.”
On Saturday
afternoon, the proposal passed the House in an overwhelming bipartisan vote of
335 to 91, with 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in supporting the
legislation. Ninety House Republicans opposed the bill.
The bill –
unveiled by the House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, on Saturday morning –
will extend funding through to 17 November and allocate $16bn for disaster aid.
The bill does not include additional funding for Ukraine, which has become a
source of outrage among hard-right lawmakers.
Despite
that omission, Biden indicated that McCarthy would soon take up a supplemental
appropriations bill to provide additional financial assistance to America’s
allies in Ukraine.
“We cannot
under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted,”
Biden said. “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.”
McCarthy
introduced the stopgap bill under suspension of the rules, meaning he needed
the support of two-thirds of House members to advance the proposal. Although
House Democrats also criticised the bill’s lack of Ukraine funding, they
ultimately provided McCarthy with the support needed to get the legislation
across the finish line.
Speaking
after the vote, McCarthy expressed disappointment that a large share of his
conference opposed the bill, but said the intransigence displayed by hard-right
Republicans left him with no other option.
“It is very
clear that I tried every possible way, listening to every single person in the
conference,” McCarthy told reporters. “If you have members in your conference
that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and
won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not
pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.”
Prior to
the House vote, the Senate had planned to hold a vote on Saturday on a separate
stopgap spending bill, which also would have kept the government open until 17
November and provided some funding for Ukraine’s war efforts as well as
disaster relief aid.
But the
Senate instead reoriented their efforts toward advancing McCarthy’s bill after
the proposal passed the House. Although Senate Democrats voiced displeasure
about the lack of Ukraine funding, the House bill represented their only option
to prevent a shutdown.
The rare
weekend session came one day after the House failed to pass McCarthy’s initial
stopgap bill, which would have extended government funding for another month
while enacting steep spending cuts on most federal agencies.
McCarthy’s
proposal was rejected by 21 House Republicans, as hard-right members continued
to insist they would not support a continuing resolution. Hard-right
Republicans warned they might move to oust the speaker if he teamed up with
Democrats to keep the government open, a viable threat when it only takes one
member to introduce a motion to vacate the chair. Despite the criticism from
his hard-right colleagues, McCarthy downplayed threats to his speakership on
Saturday.
“If
somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it,” McCarthy told reporters.
“There has to be an adult in the room. I am going to govern with what is best
for this country.”
The White
House had warned that a shutdown would force hundreds of thousands of
government workers to go without pay, jeopardize access to vital nutritional
programs and delay disaster relief projects.
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