Trump signs bill ending federal government shutdown

by · CNBC

Key Points

  • Trump signed legislation that narrowly passed the House of Representatives earlier Tuesday.
  • The package of bills will reopen most of the government, which shut down Saturday morning.
  • The Department of Homeland Security's longer-term funding still needs to be addressed.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a bill into law to reopen most of the government, officially ending a partial shutdown that began last weekend.

The House of Representatives narrowly passed the bill 217-214 earlier in the day after the Senate approved it last week. Much of the government has been shuttered since Saturday morning. 

The bill provides funding for the departments of Defense, Treasury, State, Health and Human Services, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Education through the remainder of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. It also provides two weeks of stopgap funding for the Department of Homeland Security after the Senate stripped full-year funding for the agency in response to the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration officers. 

Now, Congress and the White House will turn to thorny negotiations over new guardrails on immigration enforcement in the DHS funding bill. Democrats insisted on separating out the DHS measure following enforcement actions in Minneapolis.

The Tuesday vote in the House was bipartisan. Before the vote, the lead Democratic negotiator on the spending bills, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, urged members of her party to support it.

"Passing these five full-year funding bills today puts us in the best position to win that fight" over DHS funding, DeLauro said. Many Democrats and some Republicans still opposed the bill, however.

The appropriations package was nearly torpedoed earlier in the day during a procedural vote, but narrowly advanced 217-215.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., kept the House open much longer than expected to clear the procedural vote, where he could only afford to lose one Republican. More than a handful of Republicans held out their votes, and Rep. John Rose, R-Tenn., initially voted against the measure. All Democrats voted no on the procedural vote. Many Republicans wanted to compel a Senate vote on a controversial voter ID measure known as the SAVE Act.

That caused a mad scramble on the House floor from the Republican leadership team to get the holdouts to vote yes and to flip Rose. Rose eventually changed his vote and the holdouts relented, unlocking the House's ability to move forward on the bill.

Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York had told Johnson that Democrats would not help Republicans advance the procedure under which the government funding vote would happen, requiring Johnson to work within his own razor-thin majority to fund the government. After a new Democratic lawmaker was sworn in Monday, Johnson could only afford to lose one Republican vote on any party-line measure.

"We're going to pass the rule today, it was never in doubt to me," Johnson said in a news conference Tuesday morning. "We're governing responsibly and we're getting the job done."

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Johnson spent most of Monday trying to work through rebellions in his party against ending the shutdown. Among them were conservative lawmakers demanding a vote on the SAVE Act.