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Congress passed a stopgap funding bill late on Saturday with overwhelming Democratic support after Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy backed down from an earlier demand by his party’s hardliners for a partisan bill.
The Democratic-majority Senate voted 88-9 to pass the measure to avoid the federal government’s fourth partial shutdown in a decade, sending it to President Joe Biden to sign into law before the 12:01 a.m. ET deadline.
McCarthy abandoned party hardliners’ insistence that any bill pass the chamber with only Republican votes, a change that could cause one of his far-right members to try to oust him from his leadership role.
The House voted 335-91 to fund the government through Nov. 17, with more Democrats than Republicans supporting it.
That move marked a profound shift from earlier in the week, when a shutdown looked all but inevitable. A shutdown would mean that most of the government’s four million employees would not get paid—whether they were working or not—and also would shutter a range of federal services, from National Parks to financial regulators.
« The American people can breathe a sigh of relief: there will be no government shutdown tonight, » Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said after the vote. « Democrats have said from the start that the only solution for avoiding a shutdown is bipartisanship, and we are glad Speaker McCarthy has finally heeded our message. »
Some 209 Democrats supported the bill, far more than the 126 Republicans who did so, and Democrats described the result as a win.
