US House passes short-term spending bill, Senate fight erupts

WASHINGTON (Reuters): Legislation to stave off an imminent federal government shutdown encountered obstacles in the US Senate late on Thursday, despite the passage of a month-long funding bill by the House of Representatives hours earlier.

Without the injection of new money, no matter how temporary, scores of federal agencies across the United States will be forced to shut starting at midnight Friday, when existing funds expire.

The Republican-controlled House approved funding through Feb. 16 on a mostly partisan vote of 230-197, sending the stopgap bill to the Senate for consideration as President Donald Trump pushed hard for a measure to sign before Friday’s deadline.

However, a mix of Democrats and Republicans in the Senate who oppose the House bill for varying reasons left the legislation on the verge of defeat.

A bitter fight broke out on the Senate floor shortly after the House passage and was expected to continue on Friday.

That fuelled speculation that Washington would either be thrown into shutdown mode or Congress would merely pass a very short spending bill – possibly for no more than a few days – to give lawmakers more time to negotiate. Hovering over the government funding fight are November’s congressional elections, in which one-third of the 100-member Senate and all 435 House seats are up for grabs as Republicans battle to keep control of both chambers.

Complicating the effort was a demand by Democrats to attach an immigration measure to the funding bill to protect a large group of young, undocumented immigrants, known as “Dreamers.”

Trump has meanwhile continued to push to build a wall along the US border with Mexico that many lawmakers do not want as part of any immigration deal.

With that as a backdrop, Republican and Democratic leaders were already casting blame on each other for a shutdown that was still not a certainty.

Democrats want to put the Dreamers, a group of people brought into the US illegally as children, onto a pathway to citizenship and protect them from deportation.

Trump said in September he was ending former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program shielding around 700,000 Dreamers, who are mostly from Mexico and Central America. Trump set a March 5 deadline for Congress to write legislation to protect them.

However, Democrats have argued that an average of 122 Dreamers a day have been losing their DACA protections since September, leaving them in limbo.