UPDATE
Dec 20, 2024 11:43 PM CST
The Senate passed a spending measure in the early hours of Saturday—technically missing a midnight deadline to avoid a government shutdown, but by so little a margin that the disruption will be minimal, reports CNN. The vote was 85-11. President Biden is expected to quickly sign it. Passage came hours after the House passed its version on a third try, following days of political drama that centered on Elon Musk flexing his political clout. The White House had said no agencies would shut down despite the missed deadline because the Senate was on track to clear the measure, per the New York Times.
Dec 20, 2024 5:40 PM CST
The House on Friday evening approved the third spending bill brought by Republicans, hours before the government shutdown deadline. The measure still needs the approval of the Senate and President Biden's signature before 12:01am Saturday to keep the government funded for three months. The stripped-down bill cleared the House on a vote of 366 to 34, the Washington Post reports. The measure allocates more than $100 billion in relief to farmers and natural disaster victims, and extends the agriculture policy and anti-poverty law known as the farm bill. The biggest change from the bill defeated Thursday was the removal of the provision to suspend the debt ceiling for two years that President-elect Donald Trump wanted. "What needed to come out of the bill has come out of the bill," Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said earlier in the day, referring to the debt limit provision.
These are among the policies Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans took out of the bill, which went from more than 1,500 pages in the previous version to about 100:
- Congressional pay raises: Lawmakers would have received a 3.8% cost-of-living increase to their $174,000 salaries. Elon Musk had inaccurately posted that the proposed increase was 40%.
- Junk fees: Bipartisan measures called for requiring hotels and ticketsellers to tell customers up front about any service charges and other add-ons they'd face. The effort picked up steam after the Ticketmaster fiasco in selling tickets for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour in 2022, per the Post.
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- Childhood cancer research: Gone is a law named for a 10-year-old Virginia girl who died of an inoperable brain tumor. The measure was up for a $170 million reauthorization. Democrats drew attention to the GOP move, per the New York Times. "Republicans would rather cut taxes for billionaire donors than fund research for children with cancer," Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted. Sen. Patty Murray blamed Musk. "We should not let an unelected billionaire rip away research for pediatric cancer so he can get a tax cut," she wrote on Instagram.
- Deepfake images: The GOP dropped a bipartisan provision to criminalize the publication of nonconsensual, intimate images referred to as revenge porn. The measure would have done the same for sexual images and videos created by artificial intelligence known as deepfakes.
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