Senate rejects House-passed continuing appropriations [View All]

[ProSense]

Senate rejects House-passed continuing appropriations

by David Waldman

The "jamming" play is over, and it didn't work. The Senate tabled the relevant motion by a vote of 59-36.

The House's play here was to try to hand their version of the continuing appropriations bill (to keep the government funded and running past the end of the fiscal year on September 30th) to the Senate and then skip town for a one week recess, leaving the Senate with the choice of either accepting their version of the bill, or amending/rejecting it without the House in town to react, which would leave us without a funding bill in place and trigger a government shutdown.

Instead, the Senate moved immediately to table (effectively, to kill) the House-passed version, meaning that the House will still be in session when the news comes back that there's no longer a live appropriations vehicle out there to avert the shutdown. Some of the votes to table the bill came from of the usual hard right-leaning suspects, which leads me to believe they're looking to kill two birds with one stone here: 1) to help speed the creation of a crisis, and; 2) to be able to claim they opposed the bill because it didn't cut enough, as some hardliner Republicans in the House continued to say last night.

more