There were two reasons many feared a partial government shutdown this week. The first is that Congress didn’t have time to complete difficult work on pending appropriations bills, and the second was that Republican leaders said they had no intention of approving another stopgap spending measure.
Something had to give. In this instance, it was House GOP leaders abandoning their earlier opposition to a temporary spending bill. NBC News reported:
Congress sent a short-term funding bill to President Joe Biden’s desk Thursday, averting a partial government shutdown this weekend and buying lawmakers more time to fund federal agencies through September.
Lawmakers are, of course, still dealing with the bifurcated model House Speaker Mike Johnson prefers. With this in mind, Congress will now have until March 8 — one week from today — to approve six pending appropriations bills. The new deadline for the remaining spending measures is March 22.
At that point, the House and Senate can get to work focusing on the next fiscal year.
But before the political world moves on, it’s worth taking a look at the vote tallies on the short-term funding bill (called a “continuing resolution,” or “CR”). At a Capitol Hill press conference after the measure cleared the House, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries took a moment to remind his Republican colleagues of a detail they probably found inconvenient.
“Once again,” the New York Democrat said, “Democrats have demonstrated our willingness to work together, do the right thing by the American people and provide the overwhelming majority of votes necessary to get things done.”
Jeffries had a point. The final tally in the Democratic-led Senate was 77 to 13, with far-right GOP senators voting in opposition, but the vote in the Republican-led House was even more interesting: The bill passed 320 to 99, with Democrats providing 207 of the votes needed to advance the legislation.
In other words, it’s Republicans who control the…
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