US shutdown could be averted with just hours to spare
- US Senate to vote Thursday in bid to avert government shutdown
- Shutdown threat imperiling Joe Biden’s massive domestic agenda
US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said lawmakers had reached an agreement to avoid a government shutdown on Friday, extending government spending until December 3.
The legislation, scheduled for a Senate vote Thursday morning Washington time, though important, would resolve perhaps the least of Schumer’s worries.
Federal agencies, pushed to the brink of the end of the financial year, had been preparing for a shutdown of non-essential parts of the government after Senate Democrats failed to push through a stopgap measure that included a suspension of the debt ceiling. Sixty votes are required to proceed on most legislation in the evenly divided Senate.
Stripped of divisive language, the stopgap spending bill should easily pass both chambers. But the threat of a catastrophic default is less than three weeks away and Democrats still have no solution to that problem.
Big test for Joe Biden as Democrats face Congress ‘week from hell’
“Now, we are ready to move forward,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “We have an agreement on the CR, the continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown and we should be voting on that tomorrow morning.”
Republicans blocked a previous continuing resolution bill because it included language extending the debt ceiling; Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that the government will default on October 18 if lawmakers do not act.
Mitch McConnell, who leads the Republicans in the Senate, accused the Democrats of attempting to “drain money from people’s pockets (and) spend it on socialism.”
“They want to print and borrow trillions of dollars, and then set it on fire,” he said.
There has never been a shutdown during a national emergency such as the pandemic, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the 2018-19 stoppage wiped US$11 billion from the economy.
The bills are central to Biden’s legacy, but both risk failing because of feuding between the Democrats’ progressive and centrist factions.
Civil war: Democratic infighting threatens Joe Biden’s agenda
In a sign of the jitters unsettling the West Wing, Biden cancelled a Wednesday trip to Chicago, instead staying in Washington to lobby holdouts ahead of an uncertain House vote on infrastructure.
Attention was focused on senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, centrist Democrats. They share a concern that the overall size of Biden’s plan is too big, but have infuriated colleagues by not making any counterproposals public.
Legislators were due to deliver their verdicts on that bill on Thursday although even that looked increasingly unlikely with the leftist grouping and the moderates miles apart on a path forward.
“I think it’s pretty clear we’re in the middle of a negotiation and that everybody’s going to have to give a little,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
After a day of behind-the scenes talks with aides and Democratic congressional leaders, Biden attended the lawmakers’ annual baseball game for charity, handing out ice cream bars to both teams – Democrats and Republicans – at Nationals Park.
The Republicans won, 13-12.
Bloomberg, Agence France-Presse, Associated Press
