The House Friday defeated a GOP-crafted stopgap funding bill intended to avert a government shutdown by a vote of 232-198.
The defeat came after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Thursday vowed to not take up Senate legislation designed to keep the government running past Saturday.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) called on House Republicans Thursday to approve the Senate’s CR, asserting that if they don’t, they will “own” another government shutdown.
That assertion echoes the sentiment of Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has reminded his colleagues that government shutdown have historically been “a loser for Republicans, politically.”
A government shutdown would stymie services in such areas as food safety, air travel, national parks, and the military where roughly 2 million active-duty military troops and reservists as well as two million civilian employees could be furloughed.
The last government shutdown occurred in December 2018-January 2019 and stretched on for five weeks in a dispute between then-President Trump and Democratic Congressional leadership over funding his border wall.
According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, that shutdown—the nation’s longest ever—lowered the nation’s projected level of real GDP in the first quarter of 2019 by $8 billion, of which the CBO estimated only $5 billion was recovered.
