Senate begins late-night votes on $1.2 trillion government funding bill

WASHINGTON — The Senate began voting late Friday night and into Saturday morning on a bill to keep a swath of departments and agencies open, breaching the midnight deadline to avert a partial shutdown.

The shutdown is expected to be brief and have little impact, however, as Senate leaders announced they have a deal to vote on a series of amendments and final passage of the bill. It would then go to President Joe Biden, who said he will sign it into law.

The White House budget office “has ceased shutdown preparations because there is a high degree of confidence that Congress will imminently pass the relevant appropriations and the President will sign the bill on Saturday,” a White House official said. “Because obligations of federal funds are incurred and tracked on a daily basis, agencies will not shut down and may continue their normal operations.”

Once Biden signs the package into law, the full government will be funded through the end of September.

The House voted Friday morning to pass the $1.2 trillion spending bill, which funds the departments of State, Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, among others.

The Senate indicated it has sufficient support to get the bill across the finish line following a 78-18 procedural vote on Friday that advanced the measure. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced just before the deadline that both parties have an agreement to vote on multiple amendments and then final passage of the bill early Saturday morning.

“It’s been a very long and difficult day, but we have just reached an agreement to complete the job of funding the government,” Schumer announced on the Senate floor just before midnight. “It is good for the country that we have reached this bipartisan deal.”

The divided Congress has narrowly averted multiple shutdowns this session, passing four stopgap bills that kept extending the deadline. And at nearly six months into the fiscal year, it’s unusually late in the game to be haggling over the funding measures. The latest bill was released Thursday and passed by the House on Friday morning, leaving little time for the Senate to act.

For a while, those talks appeared to fall apart mid-day Friday, with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., arguing the agreement was scuttled by vulnerable Democrats in key Senate races, claiming they don’t want to have to vote on amendments that could be used against them in their re-election campaigns.

“The bottom line is Democratic senators running for re-election are scared to vote on amendments,” Cotton told reporters, adding without providing evidence: “Jon Tester has said that he would rather have the government shutdown and vote on Sunday night then vote on these amendments for you.”

But Tester, a Democrat who is in a tight re-election race in the red state of Montana that could determine the Senate majority, fired back, telling NBC News, “That’s bulls—.”

The back and forth came to a head when the two senators were talking to different groups of reporters just feet away from each other off the Senate floor.

“Did Cotton say that they’re holding amendments because of Jon Tester?” Tester yelled at Cotton during the exchange. “Because if he did, he might be full of something that comes off the back of a cow.”

Senators were frustrated by the fact that Congress was able to repeatedly avert funding lapses during this fiscal year alone, but struggled to do so on the final one of this fiscal year.

“It makes me ill,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in an interview, adding that she felt “like I’ve had too much sugar and bad pizza” after Senate Republicans were served those items for lunch.

“If we had had salmon, we would have been thinking because it’s like we’ve all those fine omega 3s,” she said. “We’re just like — we’re a mess of a candy pizza muddle, we’re operating like teenage boys.”