The federal government shut down at midnight Thursday after a Republican senator launched a one-man crusade against the soaring deficit by delaying votes on a $400 billion budget deal and short-term spending bill to keep agencies open.
Senator Rand Paul refused to allow a vote on the expansive two-year budget package to go forward after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a fellow Kentucky Republican, would not grant his demand to consider an amendment to preserve spending caps to keep the deficit from growing to more than $1 trillion.
“I just can’t in all good honesty, in all good faith, just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits,” Paul said on the Senate floor.
According to Reuters, McConnell planned a series of Senate votes beginning at 1 a.m. to end Paul’s filibuster and approve with an expected bipartisan vote a stopgap bill to fund the government and an accompanying two-year defense and domestic spending deal and hurricane disaster aid.
House Speaker Paul Ryan prepared for a quick vote as soon as the Senate passed the package, telling lawmakers to be prepared for votes between 3 and 6 a.m., though passage appeared to be a little less certain than in the Senate.
“There will be a vote on the budget agreement to keep the government open just as soon as it gets here from the Senate later tonight,” said Ryan spokeswoman Ash Lee Strong in an email.
The White House said it had begun to advise federal agencies to prepare for another shutdown. The last one lasted three days after Democrats blocked a stopgap bill as money ran out at midnight on January 19. The bill that reopened the government set a new deadline of midnight Thursday.
On Tuesday, the House passed a six-week spending bill with a huge increase in military spending. In the Senate, McConnell attached the massive budget deal to the short-term spending measure, requiring that it go back to the House for its approval.
McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who both negotiated the budget deal to produce what Schumer called a “genuine breakthrough” in bipartisanship, urged Paul to make a point of order rather than demand a vote on his amendment. Paul refused.
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