Six Democrats Join Republicans To Finally End Schumer Shutdown After 43 Days

The House of Representatives passed a spending package Wednesday evening to end the longest government shutdown in history over the objections of Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and a majority of his caucus.

Lawmakers voted 222 to 209 with six Democrats crossing party lines to reopen the government. The White House said Wednesday that President Donald Trump will promptly sign the measure into law.

The Democrats who defected from the party line include Reps. Jared Golden of Maine, Adam Gray of California, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Don Davis of North Carolina and Tom Suozzi of New York.

Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a fiscal hawk, opposed the government funding package. His Republican colleague, Florida Rep. Greg Steube also voted “no,” citing his opposition to a provision that allows senators to sue the federal government if their phone records are seized without prior notice.

“I’m not gonna send [Republican South Carolina Sen.] Lindsey Graham half a million dollars,” Steube told reporters prior to the vote.

The 43-day shutdown forced hundreds of thousands of federal employees to pay their bills while forgoing paychecks, jeopardized low-income Americans’ access to federal food assistance and disrupted travel for individuals taking flights across the country.

The Senate approved the spending package Monday night after Democrats had dragged their feet on funding the government for seven weeks. The funding deal notably omits Democrats’ chief demand — a guaranteed extension of premium Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits — that Republicans argued was a nonstarter.

Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer notably opposed the measure that passed both chambers due to defections from their own members. Though Jeffries has remained largely unscathed from the fallout over the party’s shutdown strategy, left-wing lawmakers have lambasted Schumer for failing to keep his caucus united against reopening the government.

The shutdown deal will temporarily fund the government through the end of January and provides for tens of millions in new security assistance funding for all three branches of government.

The funding package also forces the Trump administration to rehire roughly 4,000 federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown and bars them from pursuing additional RIFs, or reductions-in-force, through Jan. 30.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended that aspect of the deal when asked by the Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese on Wednesday.

“If you look at that [the recent layoffs] in comparison to the reduction in the federal workforce that this administration has done since January … to reduce the size of our federal bureaucracy, we’ve done a lot of great work on that front. And we will continue to.”

“The president’s main priority was to reopen the federal government and get people back to work,” Leavitt added.

Jeffries and nearly every member of his caucus voted against a stopgap spending bill to avert a government shutdown on Sept. 19. House Speaker Mike Johnson kept the House in recess during the funding lapse until the Senate ultimately approved a similar measure Monday night.

“The long national nightmare is almost coming to an end now,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. “The irony is it really was a shutdown about nothing…what we’re voting on is effectively exactly what we offered them several weeks back.”

“I don’t think Chuck Schumer got anything out of this other than a political show,” Johnson continued. “And sadly, I think that’s what he was after the whole time.”