House passes bill to avert shutdown hours ahead of deadline
CNN
By Clare Foran, Haley Talbot and Morgan Rimmer, CNN
(CNN) — The House voted on Friday to pass a stopgap funding bill in a bid to avert a shutdown just hours before a midnight deadline.
The Senate must take up the bill next before it can be sent to President Joe Biden to be signed into law. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X that he is “confident” the Senate will vote to avert a shutdown and hopes “to get it passed as soon as possible.”
The bill extends government funding into March and provides disaster relief and farm aid, but it does not include a suspension of the debt limit, which President-elect Donald Trump had demanded Republicans address.
The successful vote in the House followed a tumultuous 24 hours on Capitol Hill as Republicans scrambled to find a way to prevent a shutdown after Trump upended the funding push by coming out against an initial bipartisan deal.
Trump’s opposition to the bipartisan agreement led Republicans to tank the deal, infuriating Democrats. The Republican-led House then tried and failed on Thursday to pass a GOP funding plan backed by Trump that would have included a two-year suspension of the debt limit.
That bill failed amid opposition from Democrats as well as a significant number of Republicans, highlighting the limits of Trump’s influence over congressional Republicans despite his position as leader of the party.
Democrats supported the bill that came to a vote on Friday after Republicans dropped the debt limit provisions, arguing that the GOP effort to suspend the debt limit would have helped Trump pass his tax plan.
The House vote was 366 to 34. One Democrat voted present, and all of the votes against the bill were Republicans.
The bill will fund the government through March 14, 2025, and includes roughly $100 billion in disaster relief, as well as a farm bill extension.
Following the House vote, Johnson told reporters that he spoke to Trump earlier in the evening and said he thinks the president-elect is “happy” with the outcome.
“I was in constant contact with President Trump throughout this process. Spoke with him, most recently about 45 minutes ago. He knew exactly what we were doing and why, and this is a good outcome for the country. I think he certainly is happy about this outcome as well,” he said.
Johnson said he also spoke to Elon Musk about the difficulty of serving as speaker with such a slim majority.
“We talked about the extraordinary challenges of this job. And I said, ‘Hey, you want to be speaker the House? I don’t know.’ He said, ‘This may be the hardest job in the world.’ I think it is. But we’re going to get through this,” he said.
Musk was vocally opposed to the initial bipartisan deal, but the billionaire Trump ally said on X on Friday that Johnson did a “good job.”
“The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances,” Musk posted on X ahead of the vote. “It went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces. Ball should now be in the Dem court.”
On Friday evening, ahead of a vote on the government funding bill, the Senate unanimously passed the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act 2.0, which reauthorizes a pediatric cancer research initiative through the National Institutes of Health into 2028.
The provision had originally been part of the funding deal negotiated by congressional leadership, but was dropped after Trump pushed for a “clean” short term spending package, without extra measures included.
House Republicans pushed back on outrage over the funding being cut from the package, arguing that Senate Democrats were to blame for waiting months to bring up the bill. The House had passed the research funding reauthorization in March.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Sarah Ferris, Aileen Graef, Kit Maher contributed to this report.
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