Senate Advances Spending Bill to Avert Government Shutdown

Key Takeaways

• The Senate voted Friday to advance a measure funding the federal government through September, cutting off the threat of a shutdown.
• Though in the minority, Senate Democrats could have blocked the budget using the Senate's filibuster rule. Some Democrats sided with the Republicans to avert a shutdown.
• Some Democrats wanted to use a shutdown threat to restrain President Trump and his cost-cutting advisor, Elon Musk, from slashing federal programs without Congress's approval.

The Senate voted Friday to advance a bill funding the government through September, averting a government shutdown.

Senators voted 62-38, with some Democrats joining Republicans to put the bill over the 60-vote threshold needed to bypass a filibuster. The vote ended the possibility of the government shutting down Saturday after a stopgap funding measure was set to expire. The new stopgap bill needs a simple majority to pass and move on to the president's desk.

This new bill clears the way for Republican lawmakers to hammer out a new federal budget that includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts.

The vote thwarted an effort by some Democratic lawmakers who had wanted to use a shutdown threat to curtail President Donald Trump's mass firing of federal workers.

Some Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a representative from New York, had urged Senate Democrats to use the threat of a government shutdown as leverage to demand concessions from the majority GOP.

Ocasio-Cortez and other House Democrats, who nearly unanimously voted against the continuing resolution, argued that it empowered Trump and his influential advisor, Elon Musk, to continue their campaign of firing federal workers and canceling government grants and contracts, bypassing the authority of Congress to control the government's spending levels.

The fizzling out of the shutdown confrontation removes one X-factor from a federal policy outlook full of uncertainty amid Trump's rapidly changing trade efforts.

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