CNN: House and Senate Pass Bill to Keep Government Open Until Early March

9 months ago
12

TAPPER: “Breaking news in our politics lead. The U.S. government will not shut down, at least not this time. CNN’s Manu Raju is on Capitol Hill for us where the U.S. Senate, and just now the U.S. House passed the legislation to keep the government open until early March. And. Manu, it took Democratic votes to make the difference in the House, huh?”

RAJU: “Yeah. In fact, the vote was 314-108. There were just 107 Republicans who voted for this bill, and there were 207 Democrats who voted for the bill. It was only barely a Republican majority-supported. That is — there were 106 Republicans voted against it, and that is a critical threshold for the speaker. Typically they want to move legislation that only gets a majority of the majority. They barely cleared that threshold because of opposition on the right flank, Jake. Many Republicans not happy with the speaker’s deal cutting on this issue. But they’ll have another day to fight since they’re simply kicking the can down the road until March and we’ll once again have to deal with government funding or face another shutdown threat because Congress has been unable to pass yearlong spending bills. And we’ll have to deal with this again now that they’re kicking the can down the road for just a handful of more weeks, Jake.”

TAPPER: “Yeah, it used to be, Republicans would call it the Hastert rule, which meant that they would only bring up a bill if they knew it was going to get a majority of the Republican majority. The Hastert rule is a thing of the past. It was named after former House Speaker and serial child molester Dennis Hastert.”

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