By Eric Ham
WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The Senate late Thursday agreed with an earlier vote in the House and successfully avoided a government shutdown Friday night. The Senate vote was a bipartisan 69 to 28 to extend the current federal budget to Feb. 18.
An earlier Senate vote that could have demolished the plan of both Democratic and Republican leadership to remove the threat of a shutdown was very close, however. A couple of senators had forced the Senate to decide whether to defund any mandates like President Biden’s move to require vaccinations for businesses with 100 employees or more – so far blocked by the courts. Had the defunding measure passed, the vote to keep government operating may well have failed.
The U.S. House earlier Thursday passed the budget extension. One Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, joined Democrats in support. And so the attempt by some Republicans to drive home their protest of vaccine mandates with a government shutdown went nowhere, as predicted by Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted for the budget extension.
GOP lawmakers, led by Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, had called for the removal of vaccine mandates by the Biden Administration, offering in exchange, passage of the extended spending bill which ultimately passed without him. In a Senate floor plea for votes he had called such mandates illegal and unconstitutional. In a private lunch on Capitol Hill, some Republican senators had expressed concern about Lee’s effort. Most of the Republican caucus believed they would be blamed for even a short stoppage. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats were prepared to support the bill, adding it was “not easy to reach this deal.” He said most Republicans as well did not want a shutdown, but a “few individual Republican senators appear determined to derail this important legislation because of their opposition to the president’s lifesaving vaccine guidelines.”
After the Senate’s deciding vote, Schumer said on the Senate floor he was happy to tell Americans “the government remains open.”
The conservative House Freedom Caucus also called on McConnell to use all of the tools at his disposal to deny “timely passage” for government funding legislation in the upper chamber over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates. McConnell said that would trigger “chaos.”
A vote to do that would call for a simple majority to pass, meaning they would just need to peel off one Democratic senator to get it into the bill. But it was not to be even though potential Democrat swing vote Sen. Joe Manchin had said, “I’ve been very supportive of a mandate for federal government, for military … . I’ve been less enthused about it in the private sector.”
Be relegating the budget extension to a briefly showcased sideshow the leaderships still did nothing to advance the pending National Defense Authorization bill or move toward a resolution of the debt-limit impasse which threatens to become an even larger battle than over the budget. The Dec 15 “X-day” deadline approaches after which a government default becomes possible without congressional action, an event for which there is wide agreement would be catastrophic.
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Contact this reporter: eric@macenews.com.
This story was updated with Senate passage at 10:01 p.m. ET
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