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- Government shutdown ended after a 43-day funding deal signed by President Trump, restoring federal operations.
- The bill schedules a December Senate vote on expiring health insurance subsidies, but no House promise from Speaker Mike Johnson.
- Public opinion showed no clear winner: a Reuters/Ipsos poll split blame nearly evenly between Republicans and Democrats.
- The funding package enables eight Republican senators to seek damages for alleged privacy violations from the Jan. 6 investigation.
- With the funding settled, the House may shift focus to releasing unclassified Jeffrey Epstein records and related probes.
NO PROMISES ON HEALTHCARE
The vote came eight days after Democrats won several high-profile elections that many in the party thought strengthened their odds of winning an extension of health insurance subsidies, which are due to expire at the end of the year.
While the deal sets up a December vote on those subsidies in the Senate, Speaker Mike Johnson has made no such promise in the House.
Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill, who last week was elected as New Jersey’s next governor, spoke against the funding bill in her last speech on the U.S. House floor before she resigns from Congress next week, encouraging her colleagues to stand up to Trump’s administration.
“To my colleagues: Do not let this body become a ceremonial red stamp from an administration that takes food away from children and rips away healthcare,” Sherrill said.
“To the country: Stand strong. As we say in the Navy, don’t give up the ship.”
NO CLEAR WINNER FROM SHUTDOWN
Despite the recriminations, neither party appears to have won a clear victory. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday found that 50% of Americans blamed Republicans for the shutdown, while 47% blamed Democrats.
The vote came on the Republican-controlled House’s first day in session since mid-September, a long recess intended to put pressure on Democrats. The chamber’s return also set the clock ticking on a vote to release all unclassified records related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, something Johnson and Trump have resisted up to now.
Johnson on Wednesday swore in Democrat Adelita Grijalva, who won a September special election to fill the Arizona seat of her late father, Raul Grijalva. She provided the final signature needed for a petition to force a House vote on the issue, hours after House Democrats released a new batch of Epstein documents.
That means that, after performing its constitutionally mandated duty of keeping the government funded, the House could once again be consumed by a probe into Trump’s former friend whose life and 2019 death in prison have spawned countless conspiracy theories.
The funding package would allow eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the federal investigation of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters.
It retroactively makes it illegal in most cases to obtain a senator’s phone data without disclosure and allows those whose records were obtained to sue the Justice Department for $500,000 in damages, along with attorneys’ fees and other costs.
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