US avoids administration shutdown with temporary measure

The Lower House of USA approved this Saturday a provisional measure to finance the federal government for 45 days and avoid the imminent closure of the Administration at midnight, a rule that must also be approved by the Senate, with a Democratic majority.

The proposal was announced this morning by the president of the Lower House, the Republican Kevin McCarthyand obtained a total of 334 votes in favor, 209 from Democratic congressmen and 125 from Republicans, who have the majority in the House of Representatives.

A total of 91 Republicans voted against, many of them belonging to the group of supporters of former President Donald Trump, who are grouped under the “Freedom Caucus” and also known as MAGA, who keep their pulse with McCarthy considering it too moderate.

“I don’t want to be part of the team that believes the only option is to shut down and not pay our troops,” McCarthy said at a press conference after the vote. She prefers, she added, “to be part of a conservative group that wants things to be solved.”

For his part, the leader of the Democratic minority in the Lower House, Hakeem Jeffries, stated that in the last 24 hours we have gone from “devastating cuts that would have impacted the health security and economic well-being of the American people” to “an agreement spending plan that meets the needs of the American people across the board.”

”The Republican extremists of MAGA (name given by the “Make America Great Again”, motto that the former president trump used in his first electoral campaign) have lost. “It was a victory for the American people and it is a complete and total surrender,” he stated.

The norm will now have to be voted on in the Senate, with a Democratic majority, which has before midnightto avoid a government shutdown that would have severe consequences for the functioning of the Executive and also for its economy.

The Senate was precisely preparing to vote on its own law that also sought to temporarily avoid the closure of the Government, but they will finally vote, expectedly in the next few hours, on the law approved in the Lower House.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not yet said when the bill will be voted on, while Republican senators are signaling that it will go ahead: “There is growing hope that we can avoid a shutdown,” said the Senate leader. the Senate minority, Mitch McConnell.

Today’s measure, once approved in the Senate, will allow money to flow into government agencies until mid-November and will also maintain funding for natural disaster recovery, but will not include new funding for Ukraine or border.

These two were the points of greatest friction between Democrats and Republicans and finally McCarthy opted to remove them from the game board to achieve bipartisan support, despite the rejection of the radicals of his party.

Starting this midnight, the Public administration It would run out of funds and the majority of government agencies, museums and national parks would close, while 1.3 million military personnel and hundreds of thousands of civil servants would no longer receive their salaries.

Furthermore, according to Goldman Sachs, the closure could affect the US economy, reducing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 0.15 and 0.2 percentage points for each week it lasts.

McCarthy tried unsuccessfully on Friday to pass a bill that would have funded the Administration for an additional month, until October 31, but that contained limits on asylum programs and cuts to all items except border security.

The Democrats, who oppose these provisions on the border, and the hard-line Republicans, who reject any measure to keep the Administration operational and follow the instructions of Trump, who this week urged them to resist and cause a government shutdown.

Many members of the Freedom Caucus opposed naming McCarthy as House Republican majority leader in January and even set conditions for his appointment, including changing the rules so that any Republican can call a vote to dismiss him.

In June, with the U.S. on the verge of defaulting on its sovereign debt, McCarthy reached a deal with President Joe Biden in which Congress allowed the administration to continue borrowing money for its debts, but in exchange for specific limits on government spending.

Legislators related to trump They felt betrayed by that deal and are now calling for more cuts.

Specifically, they seek to establish a public spending limit of $1.47 trillion for fiscal year 2024, which represents $120 billion more in cuts than agreed.

(With information from EFE)