The House approved legislation tonight to avert a government shutdown roughly six hours before it was set to begin. A majority of lawmakers in both parties voted to extend funding for the federal government into mid-March and approve disaster relief for parts of the nation still reeling from storms.
The bill moved to the Democrat-controlled Senate for a vote expected this evening. The outlook in the chamber was unclear, though top lawmakers predicted that senators were likely to accept what the House passed and avoid a crisis. Here’s the latest.
The vote in the House came after some last-minute chaos: An earlier bipartisan spending deal was abandoned after Donald Trump demanded that Congress also increase the debt limit. That led to a revolt in the House, which yesterday rejected a bill to fund the government. As the shutdown loomed, Speaker Mike Johnson agreed today to move forward with a slimmed-down deal that does not address the debt ceiling.
It was the kind of maneuvering that often happens as Christmas nears, our correspondent Catie Edmondson told me. “There tends to be a little bit of holiday magic when the lawmakers desperately want to go home for the holidays,” she said.
In order to placate Trump, Republicans discussed raising the borrowing cap early next year as part of a broad tax cut measure.
In other politics news:
Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump, endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party ahead of the country’s upcoming election.
Trump intends to replace at least three officials whom new presidents traditionally leave alone.
Senate Democrats asked Boris Epshteyn, a top Trump lawyer, to respond to allegations that he solicited payments from potential nominees.
Postmortems are bad at predictions, our chief political analyst writes.