A vote at the last minute. In recent days, US elected officials have striven to complete on time the examination of the federal budget bill of 1.7 trillion dollars, including 45 billion for Ukraine. It was urgent: Congress had until midnight Friday evening if it wanted to avoid a paralysis of the American federal state. It’s done.
After that of the Senate Thursday, December 22, giving nearly twenty votes to the Democrats to pass the text to 68 votes against 29, a vote of the House of Representatives by 225 votes against 201 has therefore made it possible to avoid that all the financing federal services are suddenly cut off.
In the event of “shutdown”, ministries but also national parks, certain museums and a multitude of organizations would have been affected, forcing hundreds of thousands of employees into technical unemployment. The winter 2018 “shutdown”, the longest to date, had notably affected baggage screening at airports.
“Show that the American state works”
The federal money bill was the last major text on the agenda in Congress, which will welcome new faces in January 2023 from the midterm elections. The House of Representatives will have a Republican majority and the Senate will remain in Democratic hands.
“This bill is good for our economy, our competitiveness and our people – and I will sign it as soon as it is on my desk,” Joe Biden said in a statement on Friday. The US president has yet to enact the law. “This bill is an essential piece of legislation not only to finance the state, to pay our civil servants, but also to show that the American state works”, declared before the vote the leader of the elected Democrats in the House, Steny Hoyer.
This budget must finance the functioning of the American federal state – law enforcement, diplomacy, armed forces, economic policy, etc. – until September 2023. It also includes an amendment to a law dating from the 19th century to mention that the American vice-president cannot intervene directly in the certification of electoral results.
Democratic senators in a hurry to get home before the storm
With a Democratic majority in the House, the positive outcome of the passage of the text was hardly in doubt. Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the Republicans in the House, had however called on the elected representatives of his camp to vote against the bill, in order to benefit from greater leeway when the end of the year holidays returned, when the new Republican majority in the House will take office. But Republican senators therefore largely ignored him on Thursday afternoon.
The Democrats didn’t want to drag on in Washington anyway. “The Senate has no reason to wait and there are (on the contrary) many reasons to act quickly, before a possible storm makes travel dangerous for members (of Congress), their employees and their families just before the Christmas period,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday, December 21, before the “historic” winter storm hit.
Before the vote, elected Republicans in the House of Representatives took the floor to denounce the lack of time granted to them to study the text – it was finalized three days ago – and to criticize the presence of provisions qualified as “woke”, such as funding projects in support of the LGBT+ community.
But Kevin McCarthy failed to repeat what he did in 2021, when he held the microphone for eight and a half hours to delay the vote – everyone therefore hoping to reach his family in time for the holidays by avoiding the winter storm hitting the country.