The House Just Did Its Part to Avoid a Government Shutdown. Now GOP Senators Hold the Cards.

“We hope cooler heads will prevail,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday.

Tasos Katopodis/AP

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On Thursday afternoon, the House passed a bill temporarily funding the government through the middle of February.

The 221–212 vote comes after several days of concern that Democrats and Republicans in Congress would be unable to agree on a funding package ahead of the midnight Friday deadline, pushing the federal government into a shutdown that would furlough thousands of government workers, upend some federally funded services, and derail the economy just a few weeks before the holidays.

While the House vote makes this less likely, the threat is not gone. The bill now moves to the Senate, where it will require unanimous agreement to quickly pass ahead of the government funding deadline on Friday. A few Republican senators, including Ted Cruz, have threatened to derail the funding bill unless it includes a measure to undo President Joe Biden’s business vaccine mandate. If they make good on this threat, they’ll tank the economy for hundreds of thousands of Americans just as they enter the holiday season. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned on Thursday that if this happens, it will be a “Republican anti-vaccine shutdown.”

“Democrats and most Republicans, including the Republican leader, have said they don’t want to see a Republican shutdown,” he said from the Senate floor. “We hope cooler heads will prevail.”

The last time the government shut down was in January 2019, when President Donald Trump refused to sign a budget that lacked funding for his plan to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. That shutdown’s economic impacts were enormous: It cost the US economy at least $11 billion, according to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, and more than 800,000 government workers went weeks without pay. Food banks around the country saw jumps in demand of as much as 20 percent, and furloughed federal workers turned to GoFundMe campaigns and shifts at McDonald’s to make ends meet.

If the government shuts down this weekend, similar results are likely. S&P Global Ratings estimated on Thursday that the shutdown would cost the US economy $1.8 billion for every week that it continues. 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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