Shutdown draws to a close as House passes budget stopgap
Benjamin Weiss
WASHINGTON (CN) — The longest government shutdown in U.S. history was effectively over Wednesday evening, after the House narrowly approved a short-term budget measure that will bring government programs sputtering back to life after more than a month.
The lower chamber voted 222-209 on a so-called continuing resolution, which will fund most government agencies through early January while keeping others online into next fall.
It’s a move that comes roughly 45 days after partisan deadlock caused federal appropriations to lapse, plunging the country into a protracted shutdown which saw federal employees out of work and crucial government aid programs out of cash.
But the end of the shutdown is a pyrrhic victory for Democrats, especially in the House, where lawmakers roundly opposed the Republican-led spending plan which they have long argued will lead to skyrocketing health care premiums for many Americans.
Speaking to reporters on the Capitol steps Wednesday afternoon, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries reiterated Democrats’ longstanding position that they could not support any plan to reopen the government that did not include guarantees to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year.
“We will continue to support our civil servants who have been under attack since day one of the Trump administration, but we cannot support the Republican effort to gut the health care of the American people,” Jeffries said.
In a deal struck with Senate Democrats over the weekend, Senate Republicans promised that they would hold a vote on extending the ACA subsidies later this year. Such an offer has long been a political nonstarter for Democratic leadership, who have previously said they don’t trust Republicans to back such an extension and have demanded the subsidies be tied to the proposed continuing resolution.
And while Senate Republicans may have guaranteed a vote on the ACA subsidies, their colleagues in the House have signaled that they would oppose a bill to extend the program for even one year.
But Jeffries said Wednesday the budget stopgap would not be the end of Democrats’ push to secure an extension on the ACA credits.
“The fight is not over,” he said. “We’re just getting started.”
The House leader announced Democrats would introduce a measure to extend the expiring health care subsidies for three years. Jeffries on Wednesday filed a procedural motion, known as a discharge petition, aimed at forcing a vote on the proposed bill. But Democrats would need to collect 218 signatures to force the House’s hand — and the petition is unlikely to attract much Republican support.
The ACA subsidies have, for more than a month, been the centerpiece of Democrats’ shutdown argument. Until last weekend, the party had remained firm in its demand that Republicans include an extension to the program in any legislation to reopen the government. Republicans, for their part, refused to come to the table and negotiate with their colleagues.
The 45-day impasse on Capitol Hill resulted in increasingly painful ripple effects across the federal workforce and the U.S. as a whole.
Federal workers have, for weeks, gone without pay, and some have been subject to layoffs at the hands of the Trump administration. Air traffic in some parts of the country has been drastically bottlenecked thanks to staffing shortages among airport security staff and air traffic controllers.
And funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program lapsed earlier this month after the White House refused to tap the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s emergency fund to save more than 40 million Americans from losing food aid. The Trump administration has so far refused to comply with court orders demanding it fund SNAP benefits and appealed to the Supreme Court. The justices on Tuesday night extended a pause on the lower court order in anticipation of the end of the shutdown.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats who broke with their party to support the Republican continuing resolution have defended themselves against criticism that they folded to GOP demands without securing much in return.
New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen said Sunday that Democrats had secured a “guaranteed vote on a guaranteed date” on a bill extending ACA subsidies. But she acknowledged that her Republican colleagues had not committed to vote for such legislation, contending that there was “never a guarantee” it would become law.
While House Republicans broadly supported the continuing resolution Wednesday, they expressed distaste with a provision written into the measure by their Senate colleagues which would allow a group of Republican lawmakers to sue the Justice Department amid revelations that investigators subpoenaed their phone records in connection with a probe into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
House Speaker Mike Johnson was among the Republicans who disagreed with the provision and announced that the lower chamber would pass standalone legislation rolling back the language. Speaking to reporters off the House floor, he criticized the provision as a “last minute” addition from Senate Republicans.
“I think it’s a really bad look, and we’re going to fix it in the House,” said Johnson.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is expected to sign the continuing resolution and formally reopen the government as early as Wednesday night. This most recent shutdown was the longest in U.S. history, followed closely by a 35-day shutdown which occurred in late 2018, during Trump’s first term in office.