IT PASSED 90-6 – CHUCK SCHUMER CRUSHED AS DEMS FLIP

Senate Passes a Bipartisan Shutdown Fix - But the Bigger Funding Fight Was Pushed Into December

The 90-6 vote shows broad agreement on avoiding a pre-election shutdown. The House still has to decide whether to accept the Senate's Dec. 11 deadline and temporary limits on the administration's grant policy.

Republicans and Democrats have disagreed over much of President Donald Trump's agenda.

They found unusually broad common ground early Saturday on one issue: keeping the federal government open beyond the midterm elections.

The Senate approved H.R. 6500, as amended, by a 90-6 vote, with one senator voting present, sending a temporary government-funding package back to the House before senators left Washington for a five-week recess.

The senator voting present was Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., not "Darline Graham," as some reports have misstated.

The bill would generally continue federal funding at current fiscal-year 2026 levels through December 11, 2026, with a series of targeted exceptions and temporary policy provisions.

That means the Senate has created a path around a shutdown before the October 1 start of the new fiscal year.

It has not finished the job.

The House has already passed a different continuing resolution.

Its measure, H.R. 9770, would extend funding through December 4, one week earlier than the Senate bill.

The House approved that version 220-205 in July.

So Congress now has two short-term funding plans with the same immediate goal but different expiration dates and policy language.

The chambers will have to agree on one version before current funding expires on September 30.

That is why the Senate's overwhelming vote is both significant and incomplete.

A 90-6 margin demonstrates that senators in both parties want to avoid an election-season government shutdown.

But the most important disputes were not resolved.

They were postponed.

The clearest example involves a Trump administration proposal governing federal grants.

The administration has been pursuing changes to federal financial-assistance rules that would give senior political appointees a greater role in reviewing discretionary grant opportunities and awards for consistency with agency priorities and what the administration defines as the national interest.

The White House argues that stronger political accountability can help prevent waste and ensure federal grants advance elected officials' priorities.

Opponents see a different risk.

They worry that political appointees could gain too much influence over decisions that historically have relied heavily on career officials, technical standards and competitive grant processes.

The Senate continuing resolution does not permanently kill the administration's proposal.

Instead, it creates a temporary pause.

Section 157 of the Senate amendment would prevent the relevant rule - or a substantially similar one - from being issued, finalized or taking effect through December 11.

That distinction matters.

The Senate did not settle the underlying argument over who should control federal grant approvals.

It simply ensured that the administration cannot implement the new framework while the stopgap funding law is in effect.

If the provision survives negotiations with the House, the fight would return when Congress revisits government funding in December.

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, has opposed the proposed rule and pointed to the unusually large number of negative public comments submitted in response to it.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the committee's ranking Democrat, has also argued that the proposal would politicize federal spending decisions.

Their objections helped turn the grant provision into one of the more consequential policy riders in an otherwise temporary spending bill.

Another dispute involved intoxicating hemp products.

Congress previously enacted new restrictions that were scheduled to begin taking effect in November.

Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., offered an amendment that would have prevented the Senate bill from delaying those restrictions.

The Senate voted 61-32 to table Budd's amendment, effectively preserving the delay contained in the continuing resolution.

The final Senate language is more nuanced than saying every hemp restriction has simply been postponed.

It delays most of the new restrictions until December 11 while allowing a narrower category of provisions to operate on the earlier timetable.

That gives lawmakers and the administration additional time to revisit how the new hemp rules should be implemented.

Immigration funding creates another area where the shorthand can be misleading.

The Senate bill does not eliminate existing funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection.

Those agencies already operate under previously enacted appropriations and other funding laws.

What the Senate measure does is continue most government accounts at existing rates rather than add a new funding anomaly for ICE or CBP.

Reporting on the Senate agreement also indicates that the measure restricts the administration's ability to redirect additional money from other programs to Border Patrol during the life of the continuing resolution.

That is a more precise description than saying the agencies receive "no funding" under the bill.

The White House nevertheless endorsed the Senate package.

In an official Statement of Administration Policy, the administration described the measure as a short-term continuing resolution that would fund agencies through December 11 while negotiations continue over full-year appropriations.

The statement said every member of Congress should support the bill and indicated that presidential advisers would recommend that Trump sign it.

That endorsement is politically important because some House Republicans have objected to parts of the Senate language.

It gives congressional leaders a stronger argument that voting for the Senate bill would not amount to defying the president.

House Democrats have also described the Senate version as an improvement over the House-passed bill.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, praised the temporary protection against the administration's grant-rule proposal while arguing that Congress should still be working toward full-year appropriations rather than relying on repeated stopgap measures.

That is the larger problem a continuing resolution cannot solve.

A CR prevents an immediate shutdown.

It does not settle the annual spending bills, the grant-policy dispute, immigration-funding arguments or the other policy fights that Congress has pushed toward the end of the year.

And because the Senate bill expires after the midterm elections, lawmakers would return to those disputes in a very different political environment.

The timing is deliberate.

By funding the government into December, Congress can remove the immediate threat of a shutdown from the final weeks of the 2026 campaign.

That reduces one major source of political risk for both parties.

It also concentrates the next funding confrontation into the lame-duck period after voters have already decided control of Congress.

The Senate's early-morning vote therefore settled one issue.

There is overwhelming bipartisan support in that chamber for avoiding a government shutdown before the midterms.

What it did not settle is which version of the stopgap bill the House will accept - or whether the temporary compromises on federal grants, hemp rules and immigration funding will survive the next round of negotiations.

The 90-6 vote bought Congress time.