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The Senate took its first step toward averting a government shutdown, but there’s still a long way to go on an increasingly shorter path to keep the lights on in Washington, D.C.
Lawmakers advanced a $174 billion, three-bill package through its first procedural hurdle on Monday evening with an 81-14 vote, teeing up a vote to send the tranche of funding bills, known as a minibus, to President Donald Trump’s desk later this week.
The package, which easily sailed through the House last week, similarly cruised through the key test vote on a wave of bipartisan support — a sign that neither party wants to thrust the government into another shutdown just months after the longest closure in history.
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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., noted that Senate Democrats weren’t looking for another shutdown last week and said that “Democrats want to fund the appropriations, the spending bills, all the way through 2026.”
“We want to work in a bicameral, bipartisan way to do it and the good news is our Republican appropriators are working with us,” Schumer told ABC Sunday morning.
While the successful procedural vote acted as a good sign for final passage of the package, it doesn’t mean that lawmakers are completely out of the woods when it comes to preventing another shutdown.
They have until Jan. 30 to fund the rest of the government, and some in the Senate believe that they won’t have time to finish their work before the deadline. That means another continuing resolution (CR) will likely be in the cards.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said a short-term funding bill is inevitable.
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He noted that, so far, the Senate has only passed three funding bills. If the latest package is successful, that would put lawmakers at the halfway mark of the dozen bills needed to avert a shutdown.
“Of course there’s gonna be a short-term CR,” Kennedy said. “There’s gonna be a CR, it’s just a question of how big is the CR going to be?”
There is another, smaller funding package that could soon make its way through the House. But the $77 billion two-bill bundle that includes funding legislation for Financial Services and National Security still won’t be enough to prevent a shutdown.
Notably, the package lacks the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appropriations bill, which was supposed to be included. That bill is a perennial headache for lawmakers and often acts as a lightning rod for political enmity.
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“The DHS bill is always one of the most difficult ones,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said. “And creates more, seems like more of a kind of a political conflict of all the appropriations bills.”
Following the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minnesota last week, that political division reached another level.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Committee, argued that what happened to Good “has crystallized for the American people the real danger that exists out there in the way that ICE and [Customs and Border Protection] are operating.”
Murphy suggested that he would want to see constraints built into the DHS bill that deal with CBP, such as beefed up training for officers.
“I understand we have to get Republican votes,” Murphy said. “So I’m not proposing we fix this overnight, but I think it should be clear to Republicans that if they want Democratic votes for a DHS appropriations bill, they’re going to have to work with us on our concerns. That’s how the Senate works.”
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