House fails to pass stopgap funding bill, making shutdown likely

As expected, the U.S. House of Representatives failed to pass a stopgap government funding measure today, with 21 right-wing Republicans joining Democrats to sink the conservative (but apparently not conservative enough) bill on a 198-232 vote.

That means that the government is likely headed for a shutdown tomorrow at midnight, unless some magical bipartisan deal emerges in the next 33 hours. Even if the House stopgap bill had passed today, a shutdown would have still been on the horizon, since the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House opposed the House’s proposal.

Among New Jersey representatives, today’s vote was party-line: all Republicans in favor, all Democrats opposed. The state’s three Republican representatives have typically not been among those Republicans who have bucked party leadership on spending bills.

In fact, every moderate House Republican, some of whom have bristled at House leadership’s approach to government funding, voted for the bill, which would have made substantial cuts across a wide variety of government departments. Some Democrats are already predicting that the vote will come back to haunt swing-district Republicans like Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield).

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), who like the rest of his caucus voted against the bill, blamed the failure on right-wing House members who have stymied bipartisan negotiation thus far.

“Extreme Republicans on the right want to shut down the government,” Pallone said. “Whatever they’re doing in the interim, it’s all about the shutdown. They don’t seem to care at all about the consequences for the people that will suffer, for the military that won’t get paid.”

To fund the government long-term, Congress needs to pass 12 appropriations bills applying to various federal government departments. The House has passed four of the 12 – all of them quite conservative bills that wouldn’t stand much of a chance in the Senate – while the Senate has passed zero, necessitating a stopgap measure called a continuing resolution (CR).

The Senate is working on a bipartisan CR, and some House members have proposed a bipartisan solution as well, with one prominent plan coming from the Rep. Josh Gottheimer-led Problem Solvers Caucus. But those proposals have gone nowhere in the House so far, putting the government on the road to shutting down.