Congress funds government until December, averting preelection shutdown

The House on Tuesday voted to send a short-term extension of government funding to President Trump’s desk, avoiding a politically risky shutdown before the midterm elections.

The continuing resolution (CR), which funds the government through Dec. 11, passed the House on a 370-48 vote, with 19 Republicans and 29 Democrats voting in opposition. The Senate advanced the measure by a landslide last month .

The CR now pushes the spending battle to before the holidays, when the outcome of the midterms will help determine how much leverage each party holds to set the spending agenda.

It’s rare for Congress to pass a CR this early in the year, almost a month before funding expires on Sept. 30 — even as political polarization has made finding bipartisan consensus on funding increasingly difficult and CRs necessary to keep the government open.

But the early timeline and the broad bipartisan support the CR received are clear signals that both parties were anxious to avoid a fall funding fight with the congressional majority hanging in the balance. Congress has contended with two record-breaking shutdowns in the past year alone.

The Senate version of the CR was adopted by a margin of 90-6, and several of the Democratic senators who voted “no” did so as a signal, as they knew the bill would succeed without them.

Still, the funding stopgap didn’t get universal support in the House, and it could cause problems for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

Some hard-line Republicans voted against the CR — and voted against a rule for four unrelated bills — because of objections to provisions the Senate had added, including a short-term delay of a ban on intoxicating hemp products. The White House and the cannabis industry want to delay a congressionally enacted ban for a month to negotiate a different deal, but many Republicans want the ban to kick in as planned.

Some are also not thrilled with a provision that temporarily blocks a rule that would reshape how the Trump administration disperses federal grants by giving more power to political appointees in distributing federal funds.

House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said avoiding a shutdown was worth the complaints.

“When we passed our continuing resolution over here, we knew it would change when it got to the Senate,” Cole said on the floor just before the vote. “Some of those changes I actually agree with, some of them I don’t. But they don’t really change the substance of the fact we bought the time that we need to get through the election cycle and hopefully the time that we need to get down to serious bargaining on the other side of it.”

Democrats have generally not been inclined to back government funding resolutions during Trump’s second term. But the grantmaking provision added by the Senate, coupled with a desire to prevent a funding lapse, brought many Democrats on board.

On Tuesday morning, House Democrats huddled behind closed doors in the Capitol basement for their first all-caucus, in-person meeting since the House left Washington in July for the long summer break. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, made the case for supporting the funding package. “That’s a big statement from the ranking member. She’s my ranking member, so I have a tough time disagreeing with her,” quipped Rep. Pete Aguilar (Calif.), the chair of the House Democratic Caucus and a member of the Appropriations panel. Others jumped on board, even as some of them bashed the process of funding the government on a temporary basis. Rep. Ted Lieu (Calif.), the vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus, noted the shutdown deadline is not until Oct. 1 and argued that Congress should work to come up with a longer-term package. “We have a whole nother month left, and the Republicans who control the House, the Senate and the White House are basically waving the white flag of surrender and saying, ‘We don’t know how to govern, we don’t know how to pass appropriations bills,’” Lieu told reporters in the Capitol. “It is not a good way to run our federal government. But it’s the only alternative that’s going to be before us, so I’ll be voting for it.”

Each party will aim to reshape government funding along its priorities in the fight for full-year bills after the midterms are decided. Another CR moving the deadline into the new year is likely, especially if Democrats retake one or both chambers.

Democrats, if they win back power, will likely seek to downsize defense spending; boost domestic programs for infrastructure, education, childcare and other priorities; and rein in the Trump administration’s powers, including cuts to executive agency staffing and federal spending in general.

Republicans might try to move full-year appropriations bills. But they’ll need Democratic support to do so, and the two parties are still far apart on spending totals.

House Republicans have passed just three full-year funding bills so far, while Senate negotiators have yet to reach a deal on a top-line spending number. Democrats will have even less motivation to cooperate with Republicans in the short term if they are expecting to retake the majority next year.