Posted on 10/01/23
| News Source: The Hill
The House and Senate cleared a “clean” stopgap spending bill Saturday, averting a government shutdown and capping off a chaotic three weeks in the Capitol that brought Washington hours away from a lapse in funding.
The continuing resolution funds the government at current spending levels until Nov. 17 and provides $16 billion in disaster relief.
It does not include any funding for Ukraine — which the White House and Democrats sought — or GOP provisions addressing border security, two items that had been central to government funding fights of the past month. Members of both parties criticized the lack of Ukraine aid, and conservatives howled about border security being left on the cutting room floor.
Here are the political winners and losers from the first quarter of the funding fight.
McCarthy will surely take heat from hard-line conservatives for putting a clean stopgap bill on the floor, and he dealt with weeks of turbulence from within his own conference.
But McCarthy proved those in both parties who predicted a shutdown wrong. And he got one of his biggest articulated conditions for the stopgap bill: No aid to Ukraine.
McCarthy secured swift agreement from congressional Democrats and the Senate on the plan he unveiled just Saturday morning, and he avoided the upper chamber jamming the House with a stopgap that included Ukraine aid.
“I think Speaker McCarthy has been magnificent. He’s pulled a rabbit out of the hat a couple of times best I can count,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.
The majority of House Republicans supported the clean stopgap, and he protected them — and himself — from bearing the blame for a shutdown.
And he is calling the bluff of those threatening to oust him through a motion to vacate the chair, when it was 21 hard-line Republicans who sunk a far more conservative stopgap plan and kneecapped his attempt to extract concessions on border policy.
“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it. There has to be an adult in the room,” McCarthy said Saturday.
Hard-line conservatives did not get many wins from the clean stopgap, but getting Ukraine aid out of it was a clear victory.
More lawmakers in Congress support Ukraine than oppose it, but Senate and House Democrats — and Senate Republicans who ardently back Ukraine aid including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — agreed to a stopgap without money for Kyiv hours before the funding deadline to avert a shutdown.
More than half of House Republicans opposed a $300 million Ukraine funding measure earlier in the week, putting GOP leaders in a tricky spot to approve the billions more that the White House has requested.