US Senate Passes Stopgap Bill Averting Fourth Partial Government Shutdown In Decade

The US Congress on Saturday averted a major government shutdown as it passed the stopgap funding bill with overwhelming support from the Democratic party after Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy backed down from an earlier demand by his party’s hardliner for a partisan bill. The bill was passed with a 88-9 vote in the Democratic-majority Senate avoiding the federal government’s fourth partial shutdown in a decade, as per a Reuters report. All the nine senators opposing the bill belonged to the Republican party.

The funding bill will keep the federal agencies running for next 45 days, although the deal left out aid to war-torn Ukraine requested by President Joe Biden. 

McCarthy abandoned party hardliner’s 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 crisis was triggered by a small group of hardline republicans who defied their own party leadership to scupper various temporary funding proposals as they demanded deep spending cuts. 

The shutdown, which looked all but inevitable, would have meant that most of the government’s four million employees would not have got paid — whether working or not — and would have resulted in shutting down of federal services, from National Parks to financial regulators.

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But the Saturday bill will now keep the federal spending at current levels and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called the lower chamber’s vote “a complete and total surrender by right-wing extremists.”

While the Democrats were content on the passage of the bill, the opposing republicans expressed that they were clearly unhappy with the outcome. 

“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, as per the Reuters report. “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.”

One of the members from the group that opposed McCarthy, Lauren Boebert said she was clearly unhappy with the outcome. “There are too many members here who are comfortable doing things the way they’ve been done since the mid ’90s,” she told reporters. “And that’s why we’re sitting at $33 trillion in debt,” she added, as per an AFP report.