House Republicans will vote on a short-term spending bill to avoid a government shutdown, as the deadline is now less than 24 hours away.
On Saturday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) brought forth a bill designed to last only 45 days past the end of the fiscal year, which concludes at midnight Sunday, October 1.
McCarthy said the bill would be a "clean" extension of the current year's funding priorities, including $16 billion for U.S. disaster relief aid that President Joe Biden requested over the summer.
The bill is being expedited past normal processes and will need two-thirds of the House to vote for it to pass. This means Democrats will also have to vote in favor of the bill.
"We need more time to get the job done," McCarthy told reporters on Saturday.
"The House is going to act so government will not shut down. We will put a clean funding stopgap on the floor to keep the government open for 45 days for the House and Senate to finish their work. We will also, knowing what had transpired through the summer, the disasters in Florida, the horrendous fire in Hawaii, and also disasters in California and Vermont, we will put the supplemental portion that the president asked for in disaster there too."
McCarthy also said his goal was not to "punish" military service members or Border Patrol agents if the House failed to pass a budget bill to end the Biden Administration's reckless spending.
The bill comes after House Republicans failed to pass a stopgap funding bill— a continuing resolution (CR)— that included conservative policy items such as border security and spending cuts.
Previous CR proposals brought forth by Republicans failed to receive Democratic support. Holdouts on the vote argued that a CR is an extension of the last Democratic-held Congress' priorities and is the opposite of the GOP's majority's promise to pass 12 separate spending bills that laid out the House's priorities in the next fiscal year.
However, both parties admitted that some stopgap is needed to give them more time to agree on a deal.
If no deal is made by midnight, thousands of government employees will be furloughed, and "nonessential" federal programs will stop.
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