The House GOP hardliners have blocked the spending stopgap

Breaking the Democrat-Republican Wall: Reply to McCarthy and Speaker Sinema on a House Bill to Avert Government Disruption

The House passed a stopgap plan to keep the government open after it narrowly averted a shutdown on Saturday. The president signed the bill shortly after midnight.

The failure is the latest display of the dysfunction that has engulfed Congress in the days and weeks leading up to an increasingly inevitable government shutdown. Feuds over spending and political tactics have caused Republicans in the House to be at odds with most Republicans in the Senate.

The Senate is working on its own bipartisan bill to avert any shutdown, but still has procedural steps to get through and the chamber may not vote before a shutdown begins.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who had for weeks brushed off demands to work with Democrats on a spending solution, outlined the proposal for Republicans in a closed-door meeting Saturday morning and then rushed to get it on the floor under a special procedure that meant it could only pass with substantial Democratic help.

Scores of his Republican colleagues voted to shut down the government. The measure was approved on a vote of 335 to 91, with the majority of Republicans and Democrats voting in favor and one Democrat against.

Hard-right Republicans refused to support the stopgap bill, known as a continuing resolution, because it essentially maintained funding at levels set when Congress was under Democratic control last year.

The White House already threatened to veto the bill, and Jim McGovern said during the debate that it was a waste of time.

The GOP bill cut spending by 30 percent instead of keeping current spending levels for all agencies, but Democrats decried the steep spending cuts instead of keeping current spending levels.

The bill cuts investments in cancer research, leaves communities recovering from disasters out to dry, undermines our allies, defunds law enforcement, and takes food out of the mouths of millions. The cost of living is too high for American families and that’s why we shouldn’t pass this bill.

The plan approved by a coalition of House Democrats and Republicans will keep money flowing to government agencies, and will provide billions of dollars for disaster recovery efforts. House Democrats saw the plan to avoid government disruption as the most expedient way to avoid widespread government disruption, even though they did not include money for Ukraine in the bill.

A group of Senate Republicans and Independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are working on an amendment to the Senate bill that would address border security, in an attempt to make it more palatable to the GOP House. It is not clear whether the proposal they are attempting to create will get the support of Senate Democrats. But some conservative House Republicans remain staunchly opposed to including any additional aide for Ukraine.

A bipartisan group of House Republicans and Democrats have been working on a plan to make sure there is a deal if there is a government shutdown.

The loss made it clear that the easiest way to prevent a shutdown is for Mr. McCarthy to work with Democrats on a compromise bill. His detractors have warned that would prompt a move to oust him from the speakership.

House G.O.P. leaders emerged from a more than two-hour closed-door meeting held after the vote without a clear path forward to avert a shutdown. The same tactic that delivered Mr. McCarthy his defeat earlier in the day is the reason why conservatives voted for the stopgap funding bill in the first place.

Despite the intense effort involved, the stopgap bill is only a temporary solution to the spending fight, which is likely to be quickly rekindled. The House and Senate are both struggling to approve yearlong spending bills and House Republicans have canceled an October break to focus on the spending legislation.

Republicans came out of the meeting “all over the map,” said Representative Steve Womack, Republican of Arkansas and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee. He thought House Republicans would be forced to consider the bipartisan stopgap plan if they could not come up with a funding bridge of their own.

The House voted 335 to 91 to extend federal funding for 45 days. The House has bipartisan support and is pressuring the Senate to accept the stopgap and avoid a shutdown.

“What I am asking, Republicans and Democrats alike, put your partisanship away,” Mr. McCarthy said before the House vote. “Focus on the American public.”

“This bill is a victory for Putin and Putin sympathizers everywhere,” said Representative Mike Quigley of Illinois, the only Democrat to vote against the bill, who said he did so because it did not include aid to Ukraine. “We now have 45 days to correct this grave mistake.”

The speaker moved to this new plan because 21 right wing republicans blocked a GOP bill on Friday. Those members “put us in a position to unfortunately pass something a little less conservative. The good news is that this is still a path to get the kind of conservative wins we need.

House Republican leaders canceled the planned district recess for the beginning of October and said the House will continue to move their own spending bills — they passed four of the 12 that fund federal agencies.

Kevin McCarthy sided with Democrats and pushed through a continuing resolution that maintained the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer spending levels and policies, said Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona. “He allowed the D.C. Uniparty to win again. Should he remain speaker of the House?”

The speaker said if someone wanted to remove him because he wanted to be an adult, they could do it.

A Key Driver of the Impasse Is Right-wing Republicans’ Response to Ukraine’s Aid: The Biden Signs a Great Resolution to the Senate Budget Problem

Democrats initially complained that McCarthy was trying to push through a 71-page measure even though he had sprung the plan on them. They did not want to be accused of putting Ukrainian aid in front of the government being shut down and paying army and federal employees.

I was wondering if you would shut the government down if there weren’t enough funds for it. On the House floor, Representative Mike Lawler asked Democrats a question.

The House adjourned immediately after the vote, leaving the Senate to either take up the legislation or face blame for a shutdown, since there was no way for the House to consider additional legislation before Monday.

“The American people can breathe a sigh of relief: there will be no government shutdown,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, after the Senate vote closed about three hours before the deadline. After taking our government hostage, MAGA Republicans didn’t win anything.

Mr. Biden said that the bill was good news for the American people. He added, “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.”

The failure to provide money in the bill was due to Republicans giving up on funding for Kyiv, even though both parties said they were confident they could win money for Ukraine.

The President of Ukraine visited Washington last month to make a case for continued U.S. support in order to get funding for the war effort. Congress has approved about $113 billion in military, humanitarian and economic aid in four packages since the invasion by Russia, and Mr. Biden has requested another $24 billion.

Source: Biden Signs Bill Keeping the Government Open Through Mid-November

The White House Appropriately Formed by the American People, and a Majority of Democratic Senators Still Can’t Back MAGA

A much larger contingent of Republicans also refused to back the measure, which also left out severe immigration restrictions many of them had demanded.

Before the vote, Mr. McCarthy said he recognized that the legislation might spark a challenge to his job but said he was willing to risk it to push a bill through that would keep the government open.

In the end, Democrats celebrated the outcome. “Extreme MAGA Republicans have lost,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said as he walked to the House floor to vote in favor of the bill. “The American people have won.”

The day on Capitol Hill was full of twists and turns. As House Democrats stalled Mr. McCarthy’s plan on the floor to allow time to study it, fire alarms rang out in the Cannon House Office Building, forcing its evacuation. It was later determined that Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, had triggered the alarm, though he claimed it was inadvertent.

House Republicans are demanding deep spending cuts, a cutoff of aid to Ukraine and immigration restrictions amid a wave of asylum seekers streaming across the southern border as the price of any agreement. Both sides in the Senate believe that Congress should follow through on a deal that President Biden made with Mr. McCarthy earlier this year.

Before the sudden turn of events on Saturday, federal agencies were bracing to close if no stopgap were enacted. The armed forces and other so-called essential workers such as air traffic controllers and airport security workers would have remained on the job but without pay until the standoff was resolved. Food and medical assistance to millions of low-income mothers and children would have been in jeopardy.