US House passes stopgap measure to avert government shutdown

The House voted 335-91 to fund the government for another 45 days, with more Democrats than Republicans supporting it.

The US House of Representatives on Saturday approved a temporary funding bill, in a major step towards avoiding a government shutdown hours before current funding was slated to expire.

The House voted 335-91 to fund the government for another 45 days, with more Democrats (209) than Republicans (126) supporting it.

The measure would extend government funding by 45 days if it passes the Democratic-majority Senate and is signed into law by Democratic President Joe Biden before 12:01am (04:01 GMT) deadline on Sunday.

The move marked a profound shift from earlier in the week when a shutdown looked all but inevitable.

Democrats overwhelmingly backed the 11th-hour Republican measure to keep federal funding going, albeit with a freeze on Washington’s massive aid to Ukraine.

The stopgap measure was pitched by Speaker Kevin McCarthy with just hours to go before a midnight shutdown deadline that would have seen millions of federal employees and military personnel sent home or required to work without pay.

“It is kicking the can down the road because the fundamental issues that are preventing this funding from going through is not something that’s going to go away in 45 days,” said Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, DC.

“Essentially the heart of the problem is some 20 far-right-wing Republicans in the House who are insistent that they get what they are demanding or they will simply not continue to fund the government.”

The shutdown crisis was largely triggered by a small group of hardline Republicans who had defied their own party leadership to scupper various temporary funding proposals as they pressed for deep spending cuts.

The proposed plan would keep the government funded at current levels without the hardline-backed spending cuts that Democrats had viewed as a non-starter. But it also does not include funding for Ukraine.

McCarthy abandoned party hardliners’ earlier insistence that any bill passes the chamber with only Republican votes, a change that could cause one of his far-right members to try to remove him from his leadership role.

McCarthy dismissed concerns that hardline Republicans could try to remove him as leader.

“I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy told reporters. “And you know what? If I have to risk my job for standing up for the American public, I will do that.”

Arming and funding Ukraine in its war against the Russian invasion has been a key policy plank for President Biden’s administration and, while the stopgap is only temporary, it does raise questions over the political viability of renewing the multibillion-dollar flow of assistance.

The Senate had been prepared to vote on its own stopgap bill later on Saturday.

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Capitol Hill to try to convince the slowly growing number of sceptical Republican members of Congress not to give up on his country.