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News Article :-
The House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, suffered another embarrassing defeat on Friday, after hard-right lawmakers tanked his stopgap funding bill that would have averted a federal shutdown on Sunday morning.
McCarthy’s proposed stopgap measure, which would have funded the government for another month while enacting severe spending cuts on most federal agencies, failed in a vote of 198-232, as 21 Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the legislation.
The Senate is scheduled to take another procedural vote at 1pm on Saturday to advance its stopgap bill to avert a government shutdown.
With less than 36 hours left before government funding lapses, McCarthy appeared to be out of options to prevent a shutdown. Speaking to reporters before the vote, McCarthy tried to pitch the stopgap proposal as a means of buying time to continue negotiations over longer-term spending bills.
“We actually need a stopgap measure to allow the House to continue to finish its work – to make sure our military gets paid, to make sure our border agents get paid as we finish the job,” McCarthy said.
But that argument failed to sway the hard-right members of McCarthy’s conference, who have insisted for weeks that they would not back any short-term spending bill, known as a continuing resolution. With such a narrow House majority, McCarthy could only afford to lose a handful of votes within his conference to pass the continuing resolution without any Democratic support. The bill cleared a key procedural hurdle on Friday afternoon, but the proposal could not garner enough support for final passage.
Republican leaders informed members that votes were now expected in the House on Saturday, suggesting McCarthy may try again to pass a continuing resolution, but expectations for some kind of breakthrough were low on Friday afternoon.
In an attempt to appease the holdouts heading into the Friday vote, McCarthy has worked to advance a series of longer-term appropriations bills that include some of the steep spending cuts demanded by hard-right Republicans. On Thursday night, the House successfully passed three of those bills, but an agricultural funding proposal failed amid criticism from more moderate Republicans.
Despite McCarthy’s concessions, members of the hard-right House freedom caucus remained adamant on Friday that they would not support a continuing resolution.
“The continuing resolution being offered today is a bad deal for Republicans,” the congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of the leaders of the holdouts, said in a floor speech before the final vote. “That’s why I’m voting against it.”
The unrelenting blockade staged by Gaetz and his allies has enraged some of the more moderate members of the House Republican conference – including the congressman Mike Lawler, who represents a New York district that Joe Biden won in 2020.
“There’s only one person to blame for any potential go
