Congress passes stopgap spending bill, averting shutdown despite GOP revolt on vaccine requirementsWashington Post, Dec 2, 2021
House and Senate lawmakers on Thursday approved a bill to fund the federal government into early next year, narrowly averting a shutdown after some Republicans sought to seize on the imminent fiscal deadline to fight President Biden over his vaccine policies.
The two successful evening votes spelled an end to a brief yet tense period that would have brought Washington to a halt come Saturday morning, a development that Democrats had described as irresponsible and dangerous in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
Even as both parties insisted they did not want to push the country toward a fiscal cliff, they still came dangerously close to missing their deadline. For days, conservative Republicans had threatened to hold up the funding bill as part of a long-running protest of Biden’s vaccine directives, including those ordering large employers to require inoculations or implement comprehensive testing programs. Some lawmakers, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), even explicitly called for a shutdown in a bid to deny the White House the ability to enforce its rules.
In the end, though, Senate leaders brokered an agreement that eased the logjam, allowing Republicans to take a vote on an amendment that would have defunded vaccine mandates applying to businesses, as well as those targeting military service-members and federal employees. That effort ultimately failed on an 48-to-50 vote, with two Republicans absent. The Senate then adopted the final stopgap bill on a 69-to-28 vote. The House approved the bill earlier in the evening largely along party lines.
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