US lawmakers scrambled Thursday to avert a weekend government shutdown as Republicans stalled a bill to fund federal agencies in a bid to derail President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate.
With the clock ticking down to the Friday-Saturday midnight deadline, the House was expected to send a stopgap measure to the Senate that would keep the government open until February 18, with cross-party backing.
Biden voiced confidence that a damaging closure would be averted, telling reporters that “there is a plan in place unless someone decides to be totally erratic.”
But hardline Senate Republicans have threatened to hold up the legislation over their opposition to Biden’s unrelated order that large companies mandate Covid-19 vaccinations or regular testing for workers.
“Unfortunately, it seems Republican dysfunction could be a roadblock to averting an unnecessary and dangerous government shutdown,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the floor of the upper chamber.
The pandemic has killed more than 780,000 people in the United States and the troubling new Omicron variant of the coronavirus has raised fears of a winter surge in cases.
But legal challenges have mounted against Biden’s edict requiring vaccination or weekly tests for some sections of the US workforce, including companies with more than 100 employees.
Republican Senator Mike Lee wants to remove federal funding to implement the mandate and is backed by several right wingers in both chambers.
“If the choice is between temporarily suspending non-essential functions on the one hand and, on the other hand, standing idle as up to 45 million Americans lose their jobs, their livelihoods and their ability to work, I’ll stand with American workers every time,” he said.
The figure Lee cited would represent more than a quarter of the 157 million people that make up the US workforce, according to the Pew Research Center.
Only five percent of unvaccinated adults say they have left a job due to a vaccine mandate, according to a survey released in October by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
– ‘Defiance of science’ –
The majority of Republicans — including the party’s Senate leader Mitch McConnell — are against the move, fearing they will be blamed for a shutdown, but in the evenly divided upper chamber, any single senator can torpedo any vote.
Nancy Pelosi, the most senior Democrat in the House, hit out at Lee and his backers, accusing them of “defiance of science and public health.”
“This is so silly, that we have people who are anti-science, anti-vaccination, saying they’re going to shut down government over that,” she told reporters in Congress.
Schumer said the stopgap deal was a “good compromise that allows an appropriate amount of time for both parties in both chambers to finish negotiations.”
“We’re not going to shut the government down. It makes no sense for anyone. Almost no one on either side thinks it’s a good idea,” McConnell told Fox News.
But there was no clear signal from the Republican leader that he had brokered a deal to bring Lee and the other hold-outs to heel.
All 100 senators would have to agree to schedule a quick vote to avoid a shutdown. If they fail to keep the government open, the closures would begin over the weekend and could bleed into the following week.
S&P Global Economics estimates a shutdown could shave around $1.8 billion off economic growth every week.
Millions of government workers and armed forces personnel would have to work without pay while national parks and museums would close.
During the winter 2018-2019 shutdown, which was the longest in US history at about five weeks, security lines at airports were even affected.
