The threat of a long budgetary paralysis in the United States receded significantly on Friday after the adoption in the lower house of Congress of a text with ample support from elected Democrats and Republicans alike.
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The Senate must now also adopt this text, without assurance that a vote cannot take place before midnight (5 a.m. GMT Saturday), the time at which the United States will find itself in an effective “shutdown” situation.
The broad consensus between the two parties in the House of Representatives gave hope, however, that this possible paralysis would be resolved quickly.
“We hope to pass it as soon as possible,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement, without specifying when a vote could take place.
A prolonged “shutdown” would mean technical unemployment for hundreds of thousands of civil servants, the freezing of several social benefits or even the closure of certain daycare centers. An extremely unpopular situation, especially as Christmas approaches.
The text adopted in the House of Representatives ensures funding for the federal government until mid-March and notably includes more than $100 billion in aid that Joe Biden had requested for American regions recently devastated by natural disasters.
This sum was already present in a first text announced Tuesday by the Republican President of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, following negotiations with the Democrats.
The agreement would have made it possible to repel any threat of “shutdown”, but was spectacularly torpedoed the next day by Elon Musk then Donald Trump.
Negotiations
The richest man in the world, who became an ally of the Republican billionaire, launched a virulent burst of posts on his social network X to express his opposition, urging elected officials to “kill the text”.
The president-elect followed suit in the evening and denounced a “ridiculous and extraordinarily onerous” text.
This twist took Congress by surprise and forced those responsible for the negotiations to start from scratch. He also gave a glimpse of a Trump 2.0 presidency even before the Republican took office on January 20. With a style – similar to his first mandate – not bothering with conventions, even if it means causing a certain chaos.
Elon Musk's resounding opposition also illustrated the growing influence of the boss of SpaceX and Tesla on major political decisions.
Getty Images via AFP
To the point, for some elected Democrats, of ironically speaking about a “President Musk”, to whom Donald Trump would be reduced to the role of vassal.
Mainly responsible for the negotiations, the “speaker” Mike Johnson was pressed on one side by the Democrats to return to the text on which they had agreed, and on the other by certain elected conservatives who refused outright any text which did not include no budget cuts to compensate for the new aid.
In view of the divisions on the right and the voting rules, the influential Republican elected official James Comer warned on Thursday that for Congress to adopt a budgetary text, it would be necessary “obviously to have support on the Democratic side”.
“Not under Trump”
The new plan voted on Friday does not involve raising the United States debt ceiling, while the absence of such a provision in the first text had been the main reason for Donald Trump's opposition.
The president-elect had even made it a sine qua non condition for any new budget agreement, otherwise he would fight “to the end” against it.
He had still not reacted Friday evening on this new plan, but Mike Johnson assured after the vote that he had been in “constant contact” with the president-elect and that he was “happy with the result”.
The “speaker” also declared having exchanged with Elon Musk, who praised on X the “good job” of Mike Johnson in renegotiating the budgetary text downwards.
Each party had previously pointed the finger at the other to attribute responsibility for a possible paralysis.
“If there is a 'shutdown' of the government, let it start now, under Biden, but not under Trump,” Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Friday morning.
“This is a problem that Biden needs to solve,” he added.
For White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, on the contrary, it was the Republicans who caused Tuesday's agreement to “explode”.
“It’s up to Republicans in Congress to resolve the mess they’ve created,” she said during a press briefing.
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