House passes bill to avert government shutdown

WASHINGTON — The House passed stopgap legislation Tuesday to keep the federal government operating past this weekend, sending the bill to the Senate days before the deadline without any of the deep spending cuts conservative Republicans had sought.

Without new spending laws, the government will shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, forcing federal workers — including military members and airport security agents — to miss paychecks on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday. The legislation, passed on a 336-95 vote, extends funding at current spending levels for about 20 percent of the federal government until Jan. 19, and the remaining 80 percent until Feb. 2.

Iowa’s Republican U.S. representatives – Randy Feenstra, Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn — all voted in favor of the short-term spending bill.

In a statement, Hinson said she voted for the continuing resolution to keep funding streaming to military personnel and border patrol. Hinson sits on the House Appropriations Committee, and she would work in the coming weeks on legislation that funds the government in “a conservative, fiscally responsible manner.”

“I voted for today's legislation to keep the government open as House Republicans continue our work on single-subject appropriations bills that cut spending and defund President Biden's wasteful and out of touch agenda,” she said.

Iowa’s delegation, along with Republican Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, voted unanimously for the previous continuing resolution on Sept. 30 that kept the government funded through Friday.

The "laddered" deadlines in the bill, called a continuing resolution or CR, are designed to allow the House and Senate to pass and negotiate full-year spending bills — though the two chambers are nowhere near an agreement on those — and avoid a massive year-end spending bill called an omnibus.

The measure could still trigger two more standoffs that lead to partial government shutdowns early next year.

"This is an important innovation," House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters Tuesday morning about the bill. "We have broken the fever. We are not going to have a massive omnibus spending bill right before Christmas. This is a gift to the American people."

Funds would expire for military and veterans programs, agriculture and food agencies, and the departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development on Jan. 19. They would expire for the State, Defense, Commerce, Labor, and Health and Human Services departments, among others, on Feb. 2.

The bill passed the House under a process called "suspension of the rules," which required two-thirds of the chamber to approve the measure because some far-right Republicans refused to allow it to proceed under a lower threshold without spending reductions.

Leaders of both parties in the Senate have endorsed the proposal, and the upper chamber is expected to vote on the bill later this week.

"I am heartened — cautiously so — that Speaker Johnson is moving forward with a CR that omits precisely the sort of hard-right cuts that would have been nonstarters for Democrats," Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor Tuesday. "I certainly don't agree with everything the speaker is proposing, and I can't imagine too many senators would have taken the speaker's approach in drafting this bill. But the proposal before the House does two things Democrats have pushed for: It will avert a shutdown, and it will do so without making any terrible hard-right cuts that the MAGA right-wing demands."

He called the laddered approach "goofy" later in a news conference, but said he and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would move "as soon as possible" to pass the legislation in the upper chamber.

House Democrats said they were not happy about the bifurcated deadlines in the bill, but were relieved to vote for it to prevent a shutdown.

"The main principle is keeping the government open. We're not talking about even saving face," Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) told The Washington Post. "This is the eleventh hour. We don't have many alternatives here."

The legislation represents a major compromise from Johnson, who eschewed calls from the far-right flank of the GOP conference to slash federal spending or add controversial policy provisions that Democrats and some Republicans reject.

And it forced him to draw on a legislative strategy that cost his predecessor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the speaker's gavel in October. Johnson did lose 93 Republican votes, and the approach landed him in hot water with conservatives and deficit hawks who have been a thorn in the side of GOP leaders for nearly a decade. But there was no sign that the right wing would push immediately to oust him, as they did McCarthy.

Caleb McCullough of the Gazette-Lee Des Moines Bureau contributed to this report.