CONGRESS REOPENS U.S. GOVT
Lawmakers vote to extend funding until March 23
THE United States Congress passed a crucial federal spending bill yesterday after hours of delay, sending the measure for President Donald Trump’s signature to end the nation’s second government shutdown in three weeks.
The House voted 240 to 186 in support of a bipartisan package that extends funding until March 23, and which will reopen government hours after a conservative senator forced Congress to miss a midnight deadline, sparking the shutdown.
Trump supports the measure and is expected to sign it into law, ending a serious and embarrassing drama on Capitol Hill over federal spending.
Hours earlier in the pre-dawn darkness, the funding bill passed the Senate, but not before Senator Rand Paul, a conservative in Trump’s own Republican Party, blocked a vote on the deal because he argued it was too costly.
The bill, which includes a farreaching agreement that increases spending limits for the next two years and raises the federal debt ceiling until March 2019, would break the cycle of government funding crises in time for what is set to be a bruising campaign for November’s mid-term elections.
The rebellion that simmered among Republicans and Democrats over the budget agreement boiled over when a determined Paul brought the Senate’s work to a halt.
The Kentucky Republican took the floor to blast the increase in federal spending limits, and in particular the fiscal irresponsibility of his own party.
“I can’t in all good honesty and all good faith just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits.
“If you’re against president (Barack) Obama’s deficits, but you’re for the Republican deficits, isn’t that the very definition of hypocrisy?” he boomed, adding that he wanted his fellow lawmakers “to feel uncomfortable” over the impasse.