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Washington — The House on Tuesday approved a short-term extension to fund the government until Dec. 4, hoping to punt the annual funding fight past the November midterm elections.
The funding patch, known as a continuing resolution, passed in a 220 to 205 vote. Six Democrats voted with all but one Republican in favor.
“The CR is as clean as they come. There are no poison pills. There’s no maneuvers. There’s nothing other than a simple extension of current funding levels,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said Tuesday.
Its passage comes days before the House is set to leave Washington for its five-week August recess. The measure now heads to the Senate, which is scheduled to be in town through the first week of August.
Government funding runs out on Sept. 30, leaving lawmakers limited time to avoid a shutdown before they head into the final stretch of campaign season.
“We want to take away the possibility of a shutdown between now and the election,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, said Monday. “We’ve seen that happen twice in this Congress already, generated by the Senate, and I’m not willing to risk a third time if we can avoid that.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday that he will put a short-term spending bill on the floor before the upper chamber goes on recess.
“That is something that I intend to bring to the floor for a vote before the August break,” the South Dakota Republican said.
Thune also indicated that he could use the House’s budget resolution, which the lower chamber hopes to pass later this week, as a vehicle to fund the government through November. That resolution would kickstart the reconciliation process, which allows Senate Republicans to pass funding bills with a simple majority and no Democratic votes.
“I hope that’s not necessary,” he said. “We’ve had conversations, productive conversations, on both sides of the aisle on a funding resolution that would carry us past the November election.”
Since April, the House Appropriations Committee has advanced all 12 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government. Three have been approved by the full House. The process, however, has broken down in the Senate, where none of the funding measures have made it out of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
House Republicans’ continuing resolution extends funding at current levels and excludes any controversial add-ons — something Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, acknowledged Monday.
But DeLauro said she would not support the measure because it fails to carry over a provision that zeroed out funding for Border Patrol, which she argued would allow the Trump administration to move funds allotted to the rest of Customs and Border Protection to the agency. In April, Congress passed a bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security — with the exception of immigration enforcement agencies — that ended the lengthiest government shutdown in U.S. history.
“Chairman Cole’s bill does not continue that agreement, giving the Trump administration permission to use billions provided by this bill to fund Border Patrol without any substantial reforms to how that agency operates,” DeLauro said. “It’s a clear line in the sand that Democrats have drawn for months.”
In a statement ahead of the vote, House Democratic leaders called the measure “a premature and desperate attempt by Republicans to abdicate their responsibility to govern while there are still several months left to negotiate a bipartisan agreement.”
“The House Republican continuing resolution gives the Trump administration even more power over the federal budget and fails to block funding for Donald Trump’s violent mass deportation machine,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California said.