House Passes Short-Term Spending Bill to Avert Shutdown

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a two-tiered short-term spending bill to avert a partial government shutdown this weekend. The measure now moves to the Senate, where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said it could pass as soon as tonight.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., brought the bill to the floor under a suspension of the rules in order to prevent hardcore conservatives in his own party from scuttling the legislation.

Under a suspension of the rules, legislation requires the support of two-thirds of the chamber’s members for passage but it bypasses a vote on a procedural rule that could have been used by opponents to block its consideration.

In the end, the vote in the House was 320-99.

The legislation, which is the third stopgap spending bill passed during Johnson’s brief tenure as speaker, moves the existing funding deadlines to March 8 and March 22.

Theoretically, this will give members more time to put the finishing touches on fiscal year 2024 appropriations for a half dozen of the “easier” spending decisions, with budgets likely to require more difficult discussions pushed back to the second deadline.

Johnson said Thursday the legislative text of the first package of appropriations bills would be released over the weekend, most likely on Sunday.

It is expected to include the funding for the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Interior, Justice, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, and House and Urban Development.

It would also provide funding for military construction, water development, and the Food and Drug Administration.

The remaining appropriations bills — providing funding for the general government, the legislative branch, financial services, as well as the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, and Health and Human Services — comprise the second batch, which must be passed by March 22.

If the text of the first package is released on Sunday, it would set the stage for a Wednesday vote in the House under the chambers’s 72-hour rule.

Under that rule, bills and joint resolutions that have not been reported by committee cannot be considered on the House floor unless the text of the measure has been available to members for 72 hours.

As previously reported in The Well News, it was the passage of a short-term spending bill that led to the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., last fall, a historic development that paralyzed the House for three weeks.

At the moment, Johnson’s speakship appears safe, but the same conservatives who opposed McCarthy’s bill are also going on record as opposing this latest continuing resolution.

“Here we are again, kicking the can down the road,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said on the House floor Thursday. 

“Buy more time so we can spend more money that we don’t have,” he added.

A number of Republicans, including Rep. Bob Good, R-Va. wanted to scrap this year’s appropriations process all together and extend government funding at 2023 levels through Oct. 1.

That would have triggered an automatic, 1% cut to most federal programs beginning May 1 — a stipulation of last summer’s bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act. 

And in a post on X, the social media platform, Rep, Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said, “I am bringing back my nickname for the House of Representatives: the House of Hypocrites.”

House Democrats meanwhile seemed relieved to see the process move forward.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, said after the vote that “like so many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I would have preferred to be voting this week on full-year funding bills, but I am relieved that the conclusion of this drawn-out process is finally in sight.”

“This short-term extension of federal funding keeps vital government programs and agencies functioning while we complete our work on 2024 bills to boost the economy, help Americans make ends meet, and make critical investments in education, job training, health care and programs to keep communities safe,” she continued.

“I appreciate the respectful bipartisan cooperation that took place to put forward this continuing resolution and move us closer to the finish line,” DeLauro said. “We can only conclude this process and invest in the programs that help Americans if Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate remain committed to carrying out our constitutional duties and finally passing full-year funding bills. The path forward is clearer now than it has ever been.”

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue