Virus Outbreak-Return to Office

Samara Duplessis, now 15, ran away from her Michigan home in May 2020, but was recovered after a few days. The picture that the parents used to find her was spread on social media as part of the Wayfair Conspiracy. The parents think she may have been at risk of being sex trafficked and they are very protective of her now. 

The Washington Post

staff

Samara Duplessis, now 15, ran away from her Michigan home in May 2020, but was recovered after a few days. The picture that the parents used to find her was spread on social media as part of the Wayfair Conspiracy. The parents think she may have been at..

Freelance

Virus Outbreak Vaccine Anniversary

For The Washington Post

Corp promises 2

handout

morning-mix-waitress-fired-big-tip

Pictures of the Week Europe and Africa Photo Gallery

News Corporation headquarters in Manhattan

other

Capitol Hill

Dollar General Workers Attempt To Unionize In Winsted, CT

U.S. Army Medics Train on COVID Vaccine Administration

Federal Vaccine Response

HONS

Midwest Tornadoes Photo

Chris Wallace

Midwest Tornadoes

President Donald J. Trump

FILES-US-TWITTER-CEO-COMPUTERS

Contributor

Getty

US President Joe Biden COVID-19 Response Team 

A graphic showing what categories of expenses drove up inflation from January to November 2021. Energy was the largest driver early in the year and used cars and trucks dominated over the summer. In the fall, energy, shelter and food were the biggest drivers of month-to-month inflation increases.

PROMO: What drove inflation in November 2021

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Election 2024 latest news: Biden holding events in battleground state of North Carolina

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

Campuses are grappling with the Gaza war. So are our columnists.

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Local sports networks go dark mid-game amid dispute with Comcast 

Middle East conflict live updates: Hamas says it views talks favorably; Blinken urges group to accept deal

Money goes elsewhere, aid workers flee, Haitians endure on their own

Why the Solomon Islands election matters to China and the U.S.

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Southwest passengers now get a $75 voucher for big flight disruptions

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

A murder plot that cannot be ignored: India must come clean at last

Trevor Williams’s escape act helps Nationals blank Rangers 

How the Nationals helped Mitchell Parker develop into a big leaguer

The 33 best things to do in D.C. this weekend and next week

Russian state media ramping up English, Spanish presence on TikTok, study finds

Microsoft is changing how you log in to your accounts

Apple is behind in AI and killed its self-driving car project. What’s next?

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Carolyn Hax: Will request for a postnup offend much younger wife?

Ask Sahaj: Responding to microaggressions is taking a toll on me. Can I stop?

Miss Manners: Offering my bedroom to guests

The beginner’s illustrated guide to watching an F1 race

Police arrest pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

US President Joe Biden Departure

House and Senate lawmakers on Thursday approved a bill to fund the federal government into early next year, narrowly averting a shutdown after some Republicans sought to seize on the imminent fiscal deadline to fight President Biden over his vaccine policies.

The two successful evening votes spelled an end to a brief yet tense period that would have brought Washington to a halt come Saturday morning, a development that Democrats had described as irresponsible and dangerous in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

The new agreement, which awaits Biden’s signature, covers federal spending until Feb. 18. At that point, lawmakers must adopt another short-term measure or complete work on a dozen long-stalled appropriations bills that fund the government for the remainder of fiscal 2022, which ends in September.

Biden vows to fight omicron with "science and speed" as cases multiply and outlook worsens.

Even as both parties insisted they did not want to push the country toward a fiscal cliff, they still came dangerously close to missing their deadline. For days, conservative Republicans had threatened to hold up the funding bill as part of a long-running protest of Biden’s vaccine directives, including those ordering large employers to require inoculations or implement comprehensive testing programs. Some lawmakers, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), even explicitly called for a shutdown in a bid to deny the White House the ability to enforce its rules.

While many public health experts have said vaccine policies have helped combat the pandemic, conservatives charged that Biden’s mandates are unconstitutional and threaten Americans’ rights and jobs. They mobilized most aggressively in the Senate, where Republicans including Roger Marshall of Kansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah threatened to hold up debate in the narrowly divided chamber, a move that raised the risk that federal funding could lapse.

“My phone has blown up and continues to blow up over the vaccine mandate issue,” Marshall told reporters earlier in the day, insisting it would result in millions of Americans losing their jobs. “I don’t want to shut the government down.”

Adriana Usero

JM Rieger

Mask mandate for transportation extended through March 18

In the end, though, Senate leaders brokered an agreement that eased the logjam, allowing Republicans to take a vote on an amendment that would have defunded vaccine mandates applying to businesses, as well as those targeting military service-members and federal employees. That effort ultimately failed on an 48-to-50 vote, with two Republicans absent. The Senate then adopted the final stopgap bill on a 69-to-28<b> </b>vote. The House approved the bill earlier in the evening largely along party lines.

For many lawmakers, the entire saga only served to highlight the extent of the political acrimony on Capitol Hill, where even the most basic responsibilities of governance quickly devolve into partisan showdowns. And it underscored the extent to which conservatives in Congress see the president’s stance on vaccines as a vector to mount prominent political attacks, a campaign that Republicans have pledged to continue in the days ahead.

“We have seen in the course of this pandemic Democrats being very comfortable with being petty tyrants and decreeing that you must obey their medical mandates,” said Cruz, who has played a lead role in prompting at least one shutdown in the past.

Washington is no stranger to government shutdowns, though each one has played out differently. For the most part, many federal operations continue during a funding lapse: Social Security and Medicare benefits do not halt, the Postal Service continues delivering mail, and military functions can proceed.

At times, though, the disruptions can prove significant. National parks often close, though the Trump administration <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/11/travesty-this-nation-people-are-destroying-joshua-trees-joshua-tree-national-park/?itid=lk_inline_manual_34">tried to keep them open</a> during a lengthy shutdown two years ago in manner that some budget experts said violated federal law. Passport applications can be delayed, and foreign embassies can curtail services. Federal agencies shutter many services deemed nonessential, sometimes delaying things such as tax filings and passport applications.

For many workers, meanwhile, the implications can be severe. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees are often sent home or forced to work without pay. Those furloughs and other consequences may not rear their heads if a shutdown only occurs into a weekend, but disruptions could prove more troublesome for families and businesses if they drag on.

With these consequences in mind, Democrats and Republicans began Thursday on a hopeful political note, brandishing a new, bipartisan funding deal. Known as a continuing resolution, it covered key federal agencies and programs into February while authorizing an additional $7 billion to assist Afghan evacuees. But the bill generally did not address a wide array of unresolved policy issues that lawmakers had hoped to tackle before the end of the year, a reflection of the tensions that have delayed progress on a slew of longer-term spending measures for months.

“While I wish it were earlier, this agreement allows the appropriations process to move forward toward a final funding agreement which addresses the needs of the American people,” said Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), the leader of the House Appropriations Committee.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), the top Republican on the chamber’s appropriations panel, later offered his own blessings: “I’m pleased that we have finally reached an agreement on the continuing resolution. Now we must get serious about completing [fiscal 2022] bills.”

Hours later, House lawmakers adopted the short-term resolution on a 221-to-212 vote, following a brief yet tense debate. Taking to the chamber floor, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) blasted the GOP for failing to provide “any help” toward funding the government even as the deadline rapidly approached.

“This is a result of the inability of the Congress to work,” he said.

House Republican leaders, in contrast, encouraged their members to oppose the spending stopgap. In doing so, they argued that Democrats had failed to negotiate in earnest because they spent too much time trying to advance Biden’s broader economic agenda, including a long-stalled, roughly $2 trillion spending package that GOP lawmakers vehemently oppose. All but one — Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) — later opposed the funding bill.

Jabin Botsford

“This government should be shut down,” Greene said, citing a need to rein in the federal deficit only days after she called for denying funding for enforcing the vaccine and testing rules. “You want to know why it should be shut down? Because the people in here. The people in here cannot control themselves.”

While the House ultimately muscled through the GOP objections, Senate leaders found themselves confronting a more treacherous fight — chiefly as conservatives raised new objections around vaccines.

Speaking from the well of the chamber, Lee earlier Thursday blasted Biden and alleged that the vaccine-and-testing policies were unconstitutional. Lee slammed Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) specifically, stressing that conservatives for weeks had made clear to him that they planned to push an effort to defund the mandates as part of the debate over federal funding.

“I don’t want to shut down the government,” Lee said. “The only thing I want to shut down is Congress funding enforcement of an immoral, unconstitutional vaccine mandate.”

Democrats, in turn, lambasted the obstruction, stressing the fracas threatened to undermine the country’s response to the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a>, particularly at a time when a new, concerning variant is spreading globally.

“We should be doing everything we can to stop this virus. We should be using every tool to keep America safe,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said just before voting began.

In allowing a vote on an amendment, Senate leaders ultimately put an end to the political stalemate. But that option for hours appeared shrouded in its own political uncertainty, after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) unexpectedly expressed an openness to supporting the proposal. Even though he opposed a similar vote this fall, it occurred before the president announced his vaccine and testing policies targeting private businesses.

“I’ve been very supportive of a mandate for federal government, for military, for all the people who work on a government payroll,” Manchin said. “I’ve been less enthused about it in the private sector. So we’re working through all that.”

Manchin, however, ultimately voted against Republicans’ proposal, which targeted some of the vaccine policies he did support.

Even among GOP lawmakers, the conservatives’ strategy proved controversial, leaving some to fear that they might have been blamed politically if a shutdown had occurred. Some Republicans pointed out that the gambit seemed particularly ill-fated since the spending stopgap had the necessary votes to prevail anyway.

“I don’t think either Republicans or Democrats want a shutdown,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). “But sometimes we can be our own worst enemy.”

<i>Tyler Pager contributed to this report.</i>

American University, BA in Journalism

Tony Romm is the economic policy and accountability reporter at The Washington Post. 


Tony Romm

Georgetown University, AB in Russian, 2004

Mike DeBonis covered Congress for The Washington Post from 2015 to 2022. He previously covered D.C. politics and government from 2007 to 2015.