Congress averts government shutdown — at least for now

Members of Congress barely beat the clock and averted a government shutdown Thursday night after a day filled with vote counting and arm-twisting by Congressional leaders and the White House.

With less than three hours before the government ran out of money, the House passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill on a narrow 219-206 vote. The House also passed a measure to fund the government for two additional days in order to give the Senate more time to vote on the spending bill.

The Senate approved that two-day funding bill to prevent a government shutdown that was set to start at midnight on Thursday. However, senators still have to vote on the $1.1 trillion spending bill.

SEE ALSO: President Obama supports highly criticized spending bill

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said a Senate vote on the $1.1 trillion spending bill, which was nicknamed the “cromnibus” bill, could come as early as Friday.

“The Senate will debate the long-term funding bill tomorrow, and we’ll vote on it as soon as possible,” Reid tweeted shortly after the Senate voted on the two-day funding bill.

In another tweet, Reid said he was “upset” with some of the provisions included in the $1.1 trillion bill and admitted that the bill wasn’t perfect. But he said a longer-term funding bill was “much better” for the nation’s economy than a short-term one.

Some Democrats shared Reid’s views, including President Barack Obama. White House Press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Thursday that the president opposed some of the provisions of the bill. But he said Obama would sign the bill, because it would provide “the kind of certainty that’s important to our economy.”

Meanwhile, there were some Democrats on the progressive side who broke with Obama and Reid and opposed the spending bill. They blasted the measure all day Thursday and encouraged other Democrats to vote against it. They were mainly upset over two measures Republicans added to the bill: one to loosen regulations on banks and another to increase the amount of money the wealthy can donate to national party committees.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was one of the Democrats who led the fight against the spending bill. Speaking on the House floor Thursday night, she said she was “enormously disappointed” that the White House supported the bill.

SEE ALSO: Congress agrees on a $1.1 trillion spending bill: What’s in it?

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also led the effort. She explained the provision loosening regulations on banks would let derivative traders on Wall Street “gamble” with taxpayer money and require the federal government to bail them out when they fail.

“A vote for this bill is a vote for future taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street,” Warren said on the House floor Thursday. “When a next bailout comes, a lot of people will look back to this vote to see who was responsible for putting the government back on the hook to bailout Wall Street.”

There were also some Republicans who opposed the bill — but for different reasons than Democrats. One of their biggest concerns was that the spending bill doesn’t go far enough to block Obama’s recent executive actions on immigration. The bill only funds the Department of Homeland Security through February, setting up a spending fight over immigration. But Republicans, like Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) wanted bolder actions.

“House leadership promises to ‘fight the President tooth and nail’ on his unconstitutional executive amnesty, stating that ‘this is the wrong way to govern,’” Brooks said in a statement Thursday night. “However, the CROmnibus is a tacit surrender to the President’s unilateral action and a missed opportunity to stop it.”

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