WASHINGTON, Oct 1 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The Senate passed a last-minute spending bill Saturday night averting a government shutdown that would have triggered a calamitous domino effect on the American public and economy.
The Senate voted to pass the continuing resolution 3 hours before a 12:01 a.m. shutdown of the federal government would have taken effect. The measure heads to the desk of President Joe Biden for his signature.
The bill, if signed into law by Biden, allows the government to stay open for 45 days, giving the House and Senate more time to finish their funding legislation.
The 71-page short-term bill, crafted by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., allocates disaster relief funds, but does not include new financial assistance for Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia.
Since the inception of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, the U.S. has unleashed a war chest worth more than $43 billion in security assistance for Kyiv.
Earlier on Saturday, the House voted 335 to 91 to pass the stopgap spending measure. The House will resume its work on Monday.
President Joe Biden took shots at “extreme House Republicans” as he applauded the bill’s passage.
“This is good news for the American people. But I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place,” Biden said in a statement after the bill passed out of the Senate.
“Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis. For weeks, extreme House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans.”
“They failed,” Biden said.
The president added that he expects the Republican House speaker will help secure more U.S. aid to Ukraine, which was left out of the stopgap bill.
“We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted,” Biden said. — NNN-AGENCIES
