House Passes Short-Term Spending Bill, Setting Up Shutdown Battle in Senate

House Passes Short-Term Spending Bill, Setting Up Shutdown Battle in Senate
WASHINGTON — The House approved a stopgap spending bill on Thursday night to keep the government open past Friday,
but Senate Democrats — angered by President Trump’s vulgar aspersions and a lack of progress on a broader budget and immigration deal — appeared ready to block the measure.
“Three strikes, you’re out,” he said, adding, “I guess the speaker has the best plan, and so we’ll just see how that works out.”
But shortly before the vote on Thursday night, the Freedom Caucus announced
that it had decided to support the stopgap bill, having extracted other concessions from the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin.
The Senate held only a procedural vote on the stopgap bill late Thursday night, leaving
for Friday a more consequential vote when Democrats are expected to block the measure.
Republican leaders had spent Wednesday pressuring Democrats to vote for the spending bill, arguing
that opposing it would effectively block the extension of the child health program, known as CHIP, which they had included in the spending bill.
If Senate Republicans were unified in support and continued to lack the vote of Senator John McCain of Arizona,
they would still need at least 10 Democrats to join them for the bill to succeed in that chamber.
Mr. Tester, who is up for re-election this year in a state that Mr. Trump won by 20 percentage points, denounced the stopgap bill as a “disgrace.”
“We keep doing patches and patches and patches and I’m done,” he said, adding: “We have to do our job, for God’s sake!