- House votes to advance funding package to end 43-day shutdown.
- Democrats oppose package because of lack of health subsidies.
- Trump backs package likely to pass with conservative support.
A deal to end the longest government shutdown in US history cleared Congress on Wednesday after the House of Representatives voted to restart disrupted food aid, pay hundreds of thousands of federal workers and revive a crippled air traffic control system.
The Republican-controlled chamber passed the package by a vote of 222-209, with President Donald Trump’s support largely holding his party together in the face of fierce opposition from House Democrats, who are angry that a long battle waged by their Senate colleagues failed to secure a deal to extend federal health insurance subsidies.
The bill has already passed the Senate, and the White House said Trump will sign it into law later Wednesday, ending the shutdown.
That would extend funding through Jan. 30, leaving the federal government on track to keep adding about $1.8 trillion a year to its $38 trillion debt.
“I feel like I just lived in a Seinfeld episode. We just spent 40 days and I still don’t know what the plot line was,” said Republican Representative David Schweikert of Arizona, comparing Congress’s handling of the shutdown to the mishaps of a popular 1990s American sitcom.
“I really thought this was going to be 48 hours: people will get their piece, they’ll have a moment to throw a tantrum and we’ll get back to work.”
He added: “What has happened now that rage is politics?”
No promises about healthcare
The vote came eight days after Democrats won several high-profile elections that many in the party believed bolstered their odds of winning an extension of health insurance subsidies that expire at the end of the year. While the deal sets up a December vote on those subsidies in the Senate, Speaker Mike Johnson has made no such promise in the House.
Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who was elected last week as New Jersey’s next governor, spoke out against the funding bill in her final speech on the floor of the U.S. House before she resigns from Congress next week, urging her colleagues to stand up to the Trump administration.
“To my colleagues: Don’t let this body become a ceremonial red stamp of an administration that is taking food from children and ripping away health care,” Sherrill said.
“To the country: Stand strong. As we say in the Navy, don’t abandon the ship.”
No clear winner from shutdown
Despite the accusations, neither side appears to have won a clear victory. ONE Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found that 50% of Americans blamed Republicans for the shutdown, while 47% blamed Democrats.
The vote took place on the Republican-controlled House’s first day of session since mid-September, a long recess that should put pressure on Democrats. The chamber’s return also set the clock ticking on a vote to release all unclassified records related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, something Johnson and Trump have so far opposed.
Johnson on Wednesday swore in Democrat Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election in September to fill the Arizona seat of her late father, Raul Grijalva. She provided the final signature needed for a petition to force a House vote on the issue, hours after House Democrats released a new batch of Epstein documents.
That means the House, after fulfilling its constitutional duty to keep the government funded, could once again be engulfed in an investigation into Trump’s former friend, whose life and 2019 death in prison have spawned countless conspiracy theories.
The funding package will allow eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the federal investigation into the January 6, 2021 attack by Trump supporters on the US Capitol.
It retroactively makes it illegal in most cases to obtain a senator’s phone records without disclosure and allows those whose records were obtained to sue the Justice Department for $500,000 in damages, along with attorneys’ fees and other costs.
