The Senate has scheduled a vote on a CR to reopen the government for Monday at noon. The CR will reportedly be the same as the previous CR, funding CHIP and eliminating the Cadillac tax, but it will not address DACA or Dreamers. To clarify, negotiations remain ongoing, and this is not a deal. Rather, it is the same bill passed by the House that failed to gain cloture in the Senate with a different date — February 9 vs. February 16.
Stay tuned.
Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R-KY) has scheduled a vote for a clean continuing resolution (CR) that would reopen the government through February 8th. The vote is scheduled for 1 am Monday morning. The move is designed to force Senate Democrats to vote against reopening the government without immigration concessions. Minority Leader Schumer (D-NY) has floated the idea of a short term clean CR to continue negotiation on enacting legislation protecting Dreamers and DACA recipients. Republicans believe the vote will put Democrats in a negative position.
Stay tuned.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) held a procedural vote, known as a cloture vote, to end debate and move on to voting with the the four-week continuing resolution (CR) that the House passed earlier this week. After holding the vote open for over an hour, the measure failed to receive the 60 votes needed end debate.
After cloture was rejected, McConnell announced that he would ask senators to vote on a CR through Feb. 8 in the near term — presumably after the weekend, so terms can be negotiated.
The federal Office of Personnel and Management posted the following status at 1:38 am EST. “Due to a lapse in appropriations, Federal government operations vary by agency. Employees should refer to their home agency for guidance on reporting for duty.”
The federal government is shut down.
All sides think that they are going to win the public opinion in any shutdown fall out.
Stay tuned.
The House voted 230 – 197 to approve a continuing resolution (CR) that would fund the government through February 16 and renew the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for six years. It does not include any immigration provisions to address DACA, Dreamers, or the border.
The measure goes on to the Senate.
Totaling $81 billion, the supplemental spending bill (HR 4667) released Monday evening is $37 billion more than the $44 billion the Trump Administration requested in mid-November. As supplemental appropriations, the money is designated as emergency spending, which does not require offsets under congressional budget rules. The White House included a list of offsets, which can be found here.
If approved as is, this latest disaster aid bill would bring the emergency spending total to $132.75 billion this year — significantly surpassing the $60 billion spent in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and the $120 billion appropriated after Hurricane Katrina.
The bill includes:
The bill includes language that would allow individuals who have lost property to wildfires to deduct damage costs on their taxes, would remove the penalty for withdrawing money from a retirement account and would incentivize donations to people and regions rebuilding after wildfires.
House leadership has not yet announced whether the supplemental aid package will be added to the stopgap spending bill (H J Res 124) heading to the House Rules Committee on today and the House floor after that.
Current stopgap funding expires Dec. 22.