House and Senate Pass Conflicting Spending Bills To Avert Government Shutdown

The Senate passed a spending bill last night that funds the government until February which gave President Trump nothing for his border wall:

“WASHINGTON — Moving to head off a looming government shutdown, the Senate passed a stopgap spending bill on Wednesday night that would keep the government funded through Feb. 8 — and would punt the impasse over a southern border wall to the new year and a divided Congress.

The bill, which quickly passed by voice vote after senators were corralled back to the chambers, was expected to pass the House on Thursday and be sent to President Trump before the midnight Friday deadline, when funding would lapse for nine federal departments.

The measure poses an uncomfortable political problem for Mr. Trump among his far-right supporters, even though it remained unclear if the president, who has been a volatile factor throughout the spending debate, would sign such a measure without the $5 billion he has demanded for a border wall. …”

After the Republican base exploded in outrage, Trump seems to have had a political near death experience and announced this afternoon that he would veto it. He also decided to take the GOP’s precious neocon foreign policy, which he ran against in the primary, and throw it in the garbage until he gets his wall funding. This is what prompted ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis to resign as Secretary of Defense.

The House whipped the votes to pass a spending bill with the wall funding:

“The House of Representatives Thursday approved a bill that would fund most of the federal government through early February — and provides $5.7 billion for President Trump’s long-promised border wall, increasing the chances of a partial government shutdown later this week.

Eight Republicans joined all 177 voting Democrats to oppose the measure, which passed 217-185. The bill now goes to the Senate, where it is certain to fall short of the 60 votes needed for passage since the chamber’s 49 Democrats are against funding the wall. That, in turn, makes it more likely that parts of the federal government, including nine of 15 Cabinet-level departments and dozens of agencies, will cease operations at midnight Friday.

The vote came hours after Trump told House GOP leaders that he would not enact a Senate-passed package that does not provide money for the barrier. …”

Half of the Republican Senate left Washington thinking the shutdown crisis was over. The pressure is now on Mitch McConnell to find some way to make this work. It will take a political miracle to thread this needle in the Senate (either McConnell will have to get 60 votes or kill the filibuster), but Trump seems poised to use his power to take his wrath out on the establishment in other areas until it happens.

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14 Comments

  1. Imagine the results of the midterm had Trump done these pull outs eight weeks ago.

    A smarter man could be accused of throwing the election, but let’s not give Trump too much credit.

    • Coulter called him a lazy ignoramus back in March.

      Everything that is happening is the result of Coulter turning the screws on Trump, and him crying Uncle and finally doing something. The last several days she’s gone nuclear on him.

      Trump pulls out of Syria to placate the base. That didn’t placate the base, so he says he will shut down the government, Then the Jews panic and get on the hotlines to their Republican puppets, and tell them to pass the bill RIGHT NOW!

      If that wall ever goes up, it should be called Coulter’s Wall.

    • Dumbass thought he could coast on Tweets. Now, too late, he realizes that his base is actually serious about the Wall (and, unspoken, ethnic survival).

  2. I wish this all would have happened sooner–pulling out of the Middle East and fighting for wall funding–but better late than never. I’ve had virtually nothing nice to say about Trump the last two years, but I’ll give him praise for doing the right thing as he’s doing now. Let’s see if he stays on the straight and narrow…

  3. I think we have to think Ann Counter for holding Trumps feet to the fire. She unleashed a blistering twitter attack upon him so much so that he unfriended her and then did an about face and announced he would not approve the budget it it did not provide for border support.

  4. After the Republican base exploded in outrage, Trump seems to have had a political near death experience and announced this afternoon that he would veto it.

    Trump desperately needs his base to support him because if he loses in 2020 then his entire future is screwed. Cohen & Flynn are both cooperating with the Mueller Probe and the only way Trump gets off scotch free is if his presidential term extends past the statute of limitations for his original campaign finance fraud schemes.

  5. Trump is usually PT Barnum but he seems to have rediscovered his Andrew Jackson side. Let’s hope he can somehow stick with it.

  6. This is why we need to hold Trump’s feet to the fire. If all we did was Fuentes-posting Trump would do nothing, or worse, the swamp’s agenda (“see his Free the Negroes” cuck-out).

  7. memories are short in the land of

    MAGA!

    during Bush43’s first term, a multi-billion dollar Wall funding bill was passed by Congress and signed by the Prez. That was back when McCain, even McCain, said: “alright, go ahead and build the damn thing.”

    but it didn’t get built. And the money is still growing moss in cyberspace, or was spent on something else entirely.

    same old. If the Wall money is appropriated (again), it will be with the firm understanding that it not got spent. But the

    “MAGA!”‘s

    will be deafening.

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