December 20, 2024

But there's more trouble down the road.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries was the point man for the fight over stopgap spending measures. Photo: Leah Millis/Reuters

With just hours to spare before a midnight deadline, and after two days of gridlock in the U.S. House, Democrats agreed to back a pared-down stopgap spending bill. This happened after Republicans accepted a pared-down version that doesn’t include Donald Trump’s demand for an immediate increase in the public debt limit. With the measure easily passing a two-thirds threshold for fast-track consideration of House bills (all 34 “no” votes were from hard-core Republican fiscal hawks who typically oppose any spending measures that don’t include deep cuts in domestic programs), there’s no doubt the Senate(still controlled by Democrats for a couple more weeks) and the White House (where President Biden is in office for another month) will approve the agreement. Even if the delay in getting the bill onto Joe Biden’s desk causes a technical government shutdown, it won’t last long enough to matter.

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