Both chambers of Congress have passed a major set of bipartisan appropriations bills, averting a partial government shutdown; along with a previous bill package from two weeks ago, the vote means that the federal government is finally funded long-term after a six-month delay.
The House went first yesterday, passing the bill (known as a “minibus”) 286-134 – which seems like a landslide margin, but since the bill needed a two-thirds majority to pass, it was actually quite close to failing. (In fact, a narrow majority of House Republicans opposed the bill; it was the minority Democratic caucus that saved it.) The Senate followed suit at 2 a.m. this morning, approving the same bills 74-24 and sending them to President Joe Biden.
Two of New Jersey’s 14 members of Congress voted against the minibus, both of them Republicans: Reps. Chris Smith (R-Manchester) and Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis).
Van Drew’s vote was hardly a surprise, given that he’s also opposed every other government funding bill this Congress, saying that he wanted to see more reductions in spending than the bills provided for. But Smith had supported every prior funding bill, so his vote was more unexpected; his office did not respond to a request for comment on his vote.
The other twelve New Jerseyans in Congress supported the bills, including every Democrat across both chambers and Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield). Several Democrats said that there were parts of the bills they don’t like, but that keeping the government open was ultimately the most important thing.
“This package of bills doesn’t include everything I want, but it staves off the worst attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, provides essential resources for agencies to continue delivering crucial government services, and includes $1 billion for childcare support,” Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) said in a statement. “Time and again, House Democrats have shown we are the adults in the room.”
There are also some things that were excluded from the package entirely, with Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair) pointing to foreign aid as a top priority missing from the minibus.
“I think in normal times, what you would have seen in these appropriations bills is some work on the supplemental, and you would have seen some support for, say, Ukraine,” Sherrill told the New Jersey Globe on Wednesday, before the bill came up for a vote. “At this point, we’re just trying to move forward, but I’m very concerned about how we’re going to get aid to Ukraine, and what that’s going to look like.”
The initial deadline to fund the government for Fiscal Year 2024 arrived at the end of last September, but absent a bipartisan deal between the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate, Congress instead passed a stopgap measure called a continuing resolution (CR) to give them more time to negotiate.
It ended up being the first of several CRs Congress had to pass before at last coming to an agreement earlier this year that could pass muster in both chambers. The first part of that deal, covering six of the 12 standard appropriations bills, was signed into law two weeks ago, supplemented now by the remaining six bills that passed early this morning.
That initial CR back in September ended up costing then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job thanks to discontent from a few right-wing Republicans, and now new Speaker Mike Johnson may be under the same threat; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) filed a motion to oust Johnson yesterday.
But Congress has departed for a two-week district work period, so Greene’s threat can’t come to fruition for a little while. In the meantime, the government will forge ahead fully funded – and Congress will have to start work on making a deal for Fiscal Year 2025.