House Passes Government Funding Bill To End Shutdown

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill to fund the government into January and end the longest shutdown in U.S. history.

The bill passed on a mostly party-line vote of 222 to 209, with six Democrats in favor and two Republicans opposed.

As soon as President Donald Trump signs the legislation, federal workers can get paid, and millions of Americans can receive a monthly federal food benefit payment that was delayed by the shutdown.

And Democrats in Congress will get basically nothing.

The shutdown started last month after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a basic funding bill, demanding Republicans agree to address expiring health insurance subsidies. Republicans said no, offering only the promise of a Senate vote that will almost certainly fail.

Eight Senate Democrats caved this month, accepting the promise of a doomed vote amid mounting concerns about the missing food benefits and flight delays resulting from the government’s failure to pay air traffic controllers.

Senate Republicans, meanwhile, gave themselves something of a bonus, with a provision in the bill that could pay certain senators millions of dollars in damages over a Justice Department probe into their phone records.

The blatant self-dealing by Senate Republicans caused bipartisan disgust among House members and prompted House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to promise a quick vote next week to repeal the provision.

The House could have stripped the provision before Wednesday’s vote, but doing so would have required the Senate to vote again, likely prolonging the shutdown since senators have already left Washington.

“We made the call last night to go ahead and proceed with it despite our reservations, but we’re gonna pass something on a standalone basis, send it over [to] the Senate, and then the trick is going to be forcing them to take action,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told HuffPost. “It’s absolutely absurd that they put that in there.”

There’s no promise the Senate will take up the separate House bill. A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced Wednesday that he plans to take advantage of the new law, saying he would sue the government for more than a million dollars.

House Democrats introduced new legislation Wednesday to extend the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies, without which some 20 million households will face higher health insurance premiums next year. It’s unclear if enough Republicans will support a compromise bill to get it through the House, or if Speaker Johnson would even allow a vote.

“We believe that working class Americans, middle class Americans, and everyday Americans deserve the same level of certainty that Republicans always provide to the wealthy, the well off, and the well connected,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday, deploying the affordability talking points Democrats used throughout the funding impasse.

Polling suggested more voters blamed Republicans for the shutdown, and Democrats won massively in off-year elections last week, boosting hopes for a strong performance in next year’s midterms. But not all Democrats sounded optimistic on Wednesday.

“We have federal workers across the country that have been missing paychecks. We have [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] recipients, millions of them across the country, whose access to food security was imperiled, and we have to figure out what that was for,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told reporters.

Ocasio-Cortez noted that the Trump administration had appealed court orders to pay November’s SNAP benefits all the way to the Supreme Court — an action regarded as a political blunder by some analysts. Senate Democrats said they weren’t willing to let food aid recipients go hungry, but Ocasio-Cortez said Trump’s refusal to pay the food benefits made it even more ridiculous that Senate Democrats caved.

“We cannot enable this kind of cruelty with our cowardice,” she said.