Jessica Sarrach ’24, Editor-in-Chief
On Sept. 30, a bipartisan vote on a bill signed by President Joe Biden pushed a stopgap into place, saving the government from an impending shutdown. Biden posted a message on the official presidential “X” which said, “I just signed a law to keep the government open for 47 days.” However, the solution is only viable until Nov. 17, then the government will be faced with the same problem as before. The hope is that the 45 days time allotted by the stopgap will give the government enough time to find a better solution to the budget deficit than to shut down.
The shutdown had been looming in Congress for weeks, yet members could not agree on an appropriate bill to pass, especially as the Republicans wanted to maintain a partisan vote. Because the two parties were unwilling to agree on a solution, the government came extremely close to a shutdown, with the bill not being signed until the night prior to the shutdown.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed the stopgap bill at the very last minute, and the Democrats expressed their outrage. Major complaints followed, saying that they were dissatisfied with the 71-page proposal being put out on such short notice, not giving them enough time to fully review it before putting it to vote. The bill relied on a bipartisan vote to pass and ultimately achieved such with 209 Democratic votes and 126 Republican votes.
Many representatives were very displeased with McCarthy’s behavior, and a couple of far-right Republicans threatened to remove McCarthy from his Speaker position in office. In response to these threats, McCarthy said, “If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room? Go ahead and try. But I think this country is too important.” The Republicans eventually voted him out of Congress on Oct. 3. Some speculate that the ousting of their Speaker may lose the Republicans control of the House in next year’s election.
In Congress’s stopgap bill, funding was cut from certain programs. The most influential program that lost funding was the Ukrainian Aid program. In the Senate, Democratic Senator Micheal Bennet held the bill on grounds of reworking the funding for Ukrainian Aid, outraged at its loss in the bill.
If the bill had not gone through, the majority of the government’s workers would not be getting paid. However, some governmental roles are too crucial to shut down, so those workers would be made to work with no pay until the shutdown was over in which they would receive their backlogged pay. Some workers, on the other hand, would be made to stop working altogether until the shutdown ended. This is the job shut down and backlogged pay process expected to occur if Congress cannot find a solution by the Nov. 17 deadline.
Lyon Life 