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The measure delays the threat of a government shutdown until just before Christmas.
WASHINGTON — Congress gave final approval on Thursday to a stopgap spending bill that would punt the threat of a government shutdown to just before Christmas, setting up a potential clash over federal spending just as the House could be weighing whether to impeach President Trump.
Hours before funding was set to lapse on Thursday, the Senate voted to postpone the spending fight, approving a measure to extend funding through Dec. 20 for all federal government departments and agencies, as well as a number of health care and community programs. That deadline sets up a potentially climactic series of votes in late December, when lawmakers could be considering impeachment articles against Mr. Trump while racing to avert a holiday season government shutdown.
Lawmakers remain divided over funding Mr. Trump’s signature promise to build a wall at the southern border — the same issue that led to the pre-Christmas government shutdown nearly a year ago, which stretched into January and became the nation’s longest. By a vote of 74 to 20, the Senate agreed to the temporary measure, haunted by the consequences of the 35-day shutdown that lasted into January. The measure received a slim bipartisan majority in the House this week, and the president signed the bill into law on Thursday.
“These are things we must do,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, lamenting the lack of a full-year spending package as well as other legislative priorities at a news conference on Tuesday.
“There are plenty of optional things that aren’t being done because we can’t philosophically agree on them,” he said, “But government spending, the defense bill we passed each year since 1961, the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada sitting there un-acted upon? Really, this is outrageous and needs to come to a stop.”
Lawmakers now have four weeks to resolve the dozen spending bills that have to pass to ensure the government is funded for the remainder of the fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1. The process so far has been muddied by a partisan divide over funding Mr. Trump’s border wall and replacing money that he has unilaterally reallocated to the construction of the wall.
“I’m optimistic that the passage of the continuing resolution today is something Congress can build from,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said of the spending bill on the Senate floor Thursday, “a sign that appropriators from both sides of the aisle are ready to work together to settle government funding by the end of the calendar year. ”
Twenty Republican lawmakers voted against the measure, some expressing consternation about governing through short-term spending bills and others decrying what they called excessive spending. None of the presidential candidates who participated in Wednesday’s debate in Atlanta voted — Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, was also absent.
But two months into the fiscal year, lawmakers will have to confront the dozen bills to maintain funding for the remainder of the year. A bipartisan budget agreement struck over the summer offered a rough framework to raise spending for defense and domestic programs, but lawmakers must still pass the 12 bills to make specific allocations for all federal agencies and programs.
“”I’d like to see us, if we could, take some of this off the table,” said Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia and a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. She acknowledged that it was possible that some of the bills, including the one that funds the Department of Homeland Security, could be among the legislation left unresolved by the December deadline.
Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, meanwhile, sent a letter to the committee chairwoman, Representative Nita Lowey, Democrat of New York, voicing concerns that “the House is focused on the purely political exercise of impeaching the president during this critical time for our committee.”
“We hope both parties in the House and the Senate can work together, putting politics aside, to pass full-year appropriations measures that the president can sign into law as quickly as possible,” the lawmakers wrote.
The short-term bill includes additional funds to accommodate the Census Bureau’s preparations for the 2020 survey, a 3.1 percent raise for military pay and language that would stop an automatic cut to highway funds. The measure also contains an extension of funding for community health centers and additional funds to stop the spread of Ebola in Africa.
The measure also provides a 90-day extension of certain government surveillance powers that trace back to the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks. It extends, for example, a law that authorized the N.S.A.’s currently shuttered system for accessing and analyzing American’s domestic phone logs. It also extends three expiring F.B.I. surveillance powers, including one that allows agents working on national security cases to get court orders to obtain relevant business records or to swiftly follow a wiretapping target who changes phones in an attempt to evade surveillance.
In effect, the inclusion of the provisions postpones, for another three months, a contentious debate over government surveillance.
Congress will also have to return to a critical provision that would replenish $255 million for historically black colleges, tribal colleges and higher education institutions that serve Hispanic students to improve science, technology, engineering and math — or STEM — over the next two years. The traditionally bipartisan measure was ultimately left out of the stopgap legislation.
Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
