House passes funding extension to avoid election-year shutdown

The House voted Tuesday to keep the federal government funded through Dec. 4, moving to push a shutdown fight beyond the November midterm elections as lawmakers prepare to leave Washington for an extended summer recess.

The short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution, passed 220 to 205. Six Democrats joined Republicans in supporting the measure, while all but one Republican voted for it, CBS News reported. The bill would maintain current funding levels and now heads to the Senate, where it will need Democratic support to clear the 60-vote threshold required for most legislation.

Government funding is set to expire Sept. 30, leaving Congress with limited time to act before campaign season enters its final stretch.

“The CR is as clean as they come. There are no poison pills. There’s no maneuvers. There’s nothing other than a simple extension of current funding levels,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Tuesday.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said Monday that Republicans wanted to remove the shutdown threat from the election calendar. “We want to take away the possibility of a shutdown between now and the election,” Cole said. “We’ve seen that happen twice in this Congress already, generated by the Senate, and I’m not willing to risk a third time if we can avoid that.”

The House is expected to leave Washington soon for a five-week August recess. The Senate is scheduled to remain in town through the first week of August. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Tuesday that he intends to bring a short-term spending bill to the floor before senators leave.

“That is something that I intend to bring to the floor for a vote before the August break,” Thune said.

Thune also said he could use the House budget resolution, which the chamber hopes to pass later this week, as a vehicle to fund the government through November. That approach would use reconciliation, a process that allows Senate Republicans to pass certain legislation with a simple majority and no Democratic votes.

“I hope that’s not necessary,” Thune said. “We’ve had conversations, productive conversations, on both sides of the aisle on a funding resolution that would carry us past the November election.”

The annual spending process has advanced further in the House than in the Senate. Since April, the House Appropriations Committee has moved all 12 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government, and the full House has approved three. In the Senate, none has made it out of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Democratic leaders opposed the House bill, saying it gives the Trump administration too much power over spending and does not block immigration enforcement funding. In a statement, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California called it “a premature and desperate attempt by Republicans to abdicate their responsibility to govern while there are still several months left to negotiate a bipartisan agreement.”

“The House Republican continuing resolution gives the Trump administration even more power over the federal budget and fails to block funding for Donald Trump’s violent mass deportation machine,” they said.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, acknowledged Monday that the measure excluded controversial add-ons. But she said she could not support it because it did not preserve a provision that zeroed out funding for Border Patrol. She argued the omission would allow the Trump administration to shift money from the rest of Customs and Border Protection to Border Patrol.

Johnson criticized Democratic opposition before the vote. “They do this to try to score political points. I think they’re making the wrong calculation here,” he said.

The vote followed recent resistance from House Republican hardliners, who had been holding up legislation as they sought to pressure Senate Republicans to pass President Trump’s SAVE America Act, NPR reported. That bill would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo identification to cast a ballot. The funding bill advanced without becoming entangled in that dispute.