Trump signs deal to end longest US govt shutdown
David Morgan, Nolan D McCaskill and Bo Erickson |
President Donald Trump has signed legislation ending the longest government shutdown in US history, hours after the House of Representatives voted to restart disrupted food assistance, pay hundreds of thousands of federal workers and revive a hobbled air-traffic control system.
The Republican-controlled chamber passed the package by a vote of 222-209, with Trump’s support largely keeping his party together in the face of vehement opposition from House Democrats, who are angry that a long standoff launched by their Senate colleagues failed to secure a deal to extend federal health insurance subsidies.
Trump’s signature on the bill, which cleared the Senate earlier in the week, will bring federal workers idled by the 43-day shutdown back to their jobs starting as early as Thursday, although just how quickly full government services and operations will resume is unclear.
“We can never let this happen again,” Trump said in the Oval Office during a late-night signing ceremony that he used to criticise Democrats.
“This is no way to run a country.”
The deal extends funding through January 30, leaving the federal government on a path to keep adding about $US1.8 ($A2.8) trillion a year to its $US38 ($A58) trillion in debt.
The shutdown’s end offers some hope that services crucial to air travel will recover in time for Thanksgiving, while the restoration of food aid may allow room in household budgets for Christmas spending.
The vote came eight days after Democrats won several high-profile elections that many in the party thought strengthened their odds of winning an extension of health insurance subsidies, which are due to expire at the end of the year. While the deal sets up a December vote on those subsidies in the Senate, Speaker Mike Johnson has made no such promise in the House.
Despite the recriminations, neither party appears to have won a clear victory. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday found that 50 per cent of Americans blamed Republicans for the shutdown, while 47 per cent blamed Democrats.
The vote came on the Republican-controlled House’s first day in session since mid-September, a long recess intended to put pressure on Democrats.
The chamber’s return also set the clock ticking on a vote to release all unclassified records related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, something Johnson and Trump have resisted up to now.
Johnson on Wednesday swore in Democrat Adelita Grijalva, who won a September special election to fill the Arizona seat of her late father, Raul Grijalva. She provided the final signature needed for a petition to force a House vote on the issue, hours after House Democrats released a new batch of Epstein documents.
That means that, after performing its constitutionally mandated duty of keeping the government funded, the House could once again be consumed by a probe into Trump’s former friend whose life and 2019 death in prison have spawned countless conspiracy theories.
The funding package would allow eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the federal investigation of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters.
It retroactively makes it illegal in most cases to obtain a senator’s phone data without disclosure and allows those whose records were obtained to sue the Justice Department for $US500,000 ($A764,175) in damages, along with lawyers’ fees and other costs.
Reuters
