The House of Representatives on Tuesday narrowly passed a bill to end the three-day partial shutdown of much of the U.S. government, virtually guaranteeing the end of the closure.
The vote was 217-214 and sends the bill to President Donald Trump, who has said he will sign it immediately. Much of the government has been shuttered since Saturday morning.
The bill provides funding for the departments of Defense, Treasury, State, Health and Human Services, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Education through the remainder of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. It also provides two weeks of stopgap funding for the Department of Homeland Security after the Senate stripped full-year funding for the agency in response to the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration officers.
Now, Congress will turn to thorny negotiations over new guardrails on immigration enforcement in the DHS funding bill.
The vote was bipartisan, with the lead Democratic negotiator on the spending bills, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, urging Democrats to support it, while a number of hard-line Republicans opposed it.
“Passing these five full-year funding bills today puts us in the best position to win that fight” over DHS funding, DeLauro said. Many Democrats and some Republicans still opposed the bill, however.
The appropriations package was nearly torpedoed earlier in the day during a procedural vote, but narrowly advanced 217-215.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., kept the House open much longer than expected to clear the procedural vote, where he could only afford to lose one Republican. More than a handful of Republicans held out their votes, and Rep. John Rose, R-Tenn., initially voted against moving ahead before changing his vote to support it. All Democrats voted no on the procedural vote. Many Republicans wanted to compel a Senate vote on a controversial voter ID measure known as the SAVE Act.
That caused a mad scramble on the House floor from the Republican leadership team to get the holdouts to vote yes and to flip Rose. Rose eventually changed his vote, unlocking the House’s ability to move forward on the bill.
Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries had told Johnson that Democrats would not help Republicans advance the procedure under which the government funding vote would happen, requiring Johnson to work within his own razor-thin majority to fund the government. After a new Democratic lawmaker was sworn in Monday, Johnson can only afford to lose one Republican vote on any party-line measure.
“We’re going to pass the rule today, it was never in doubt to me,” Johnson said in a news conference Tuesday morning. “We’re governing responsibly and we’re getting the job done.”
Johnson spent most of Monday trying to work through rebellions in his party against ending the shutdown. Among them were conservative lawmakers demanding a vote on the SAVE Act.
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