US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris meet with (LR) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) ), and House Minority Leader Hakim. Jeffries (D-N.Y.), on February 27, 2024 at the White House in Washington, DC.
Roberto Schmidt | Getty Images
President Joe Biden on Saturday signed Congress's $1.2 trillion spending package, finalizing the remaining batch of bills in the long-awaited budget to keep the government funded through Oct. 1.
About halfway through the fiscal year, the president's signature ends a months-long saga of Congress' struggle to secure a permanent budget resolution and instead pass stopgap measures, all but averting a government shutdown.
“The bipartisan funding bill I just signed keeps the government open, invests in the American people, and strengthens our economy and national security,” Biden said in a statement on Saturday. “This agreement represents a compromise, which means that neither party got everything they wanted.”
The budget deal slipped over the weekend before a midnight funding deadline on Friday, as has been typical this fiscal year with eleventh-hour disagreements derailing near-perfect deals.
The Senate passed the budget by a vote of 74-24 at about 2 a.m. EST on Saturday morning, technically two hours after the deadline due to last-minute disagreements. However, the White House said it would not initiate formal lockdowns because an agreement was eventually reached and only procedural procedures remained.
The House passed its own vote Friday morning after a week of efforts to reconcile a lingering sticking point: funding for the Department of Homeland Security, with which the White House disagreed last weekend. The White House's concerns further delayed the negotiation process, at a time when lawmakers were preparing to issue the legislative text of the budget proposal.
This trillion-dollar tranche of six bills will fund appropriations for agencies related to defense, financial services, homeland security, health and human services, and more. Congress approved $459 billion for the first six appropriations bills earlier in March, which relate to agencies that are less partisan and easier to negotiate.
With the government finally funded for the rest of the fiscal year, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Los Angeles, has cleared at least one looming issue.
But in doing so, he may have created another.
Hours before the House of Representatives approved the spending package on Friday morning, hard-line Republicans in the House of Representatives held a press conference to criticize the bill. Moments after the House narrowly approved the bill, far-right Republican Representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, introduced a motion to impeach Johnson.
If the impeachment of the Speaker of the House of Representatives over budget disputes sounds like a familiar story, that's because it is.
In October, after former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached a deal with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown, the House voted to impeach him, making him the first president in history to be removed from that office. Johnson is trying to appease the hardline Republican wing in the House of Representatives, known as the Freedom Caucus, to avoid facing a similar fate.
