By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — While every federal agency was going through contingency plans preparing for a catastrophic government shutdown, including National Park Service rangers getting ready to close most national parks and campgrounds at the beginning of the busy Autumn color season, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy failed to obtain an agreement from the far right Dixie Caucus so he turned to Democrats for help.

So late on Saturday, the House passed a continuing resolution to keep the government open for 45 more days and the Senate approved it with only about three hours to go before midnight, setting up another budget fight in November right before the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays. The Senate voted to go along for now, and President Biden signed the short-term bill to fund the government at current levels just before midnight.

In a rapid-fire sequence of events on Capitol Hill, according to deadline reporting from the New York Times, a coalition of House Democrats and Republicans voted to pass a plan that would keep money flowing to government agencies and provide billions of dollars for disaster recovery efforts. The Continuing Resolution bill did not include any money to help Ukraine, despite a push for it by the White House and members of both parties in the Senate. But enough House Democrats embraced the plan anyway, seeing it as the most expedient way to avoid widespread government disruption.

McCarthy had for weeks brushed off demands to work with Democrats on a spending solution, with his right flank threatening to pass a motion to vacate and remove him as Speaker. But a failed vote by Republicans on Friday forced him to rush to get another bill on the floor under a special procedure that meant it could only pass with substantial help from Democrats.

Democrats complained that McCarthy had sprung the plan on them and was trying to push through a 71-page measure without sufficient scrutiny. But at the end of the day, they did not want to be accused of putting U.S. aid to Ukraine ahead of keeping government agencies open and paying two million members of the military and 1.5 million federal employees for who knows how long.

“Are you telling me you would shut down the government if there is not Ukraine funding?” Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, asked Democrats on the House floor.

But it was his Republican colleagues who voted to shut down the government. The measure was approved on a vote of 335 to 91, with 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans voting in favor and 90 Republicans and one Democrat in opposition.

The outcome was similar to a vote earlier this year to suspend the federal debt limit, and it could pose difficulties for McCarthy, a California Republican, as a far-right faction they call the Freedom Caucus but I call the Dixie Caucus threatened to try to oust him from the speakership if he worked with Democrats to keep the government open.

But after a failed effort on Friday to win enough Republican votes to avoid a shutdown, McCarthy was out of choices if he wanted to prevent an economically and politically damaging shutdown. He put the bill on the floor without certainty it could pass.

“I like to gamble,” he said.

The House adjourned immediately after the vote, leaving the Senate no choice but to embrace the legislation or face blame for a shutdown, since there was no way for the House to consider additional legislation before Monday.

With little alternative, and Senate Republicans clamoring for the House bill, the Senate jettisoned its own stopgap measure that contained $6 billion for Ukraine and approved the House version on an 88 to 9 vote.

“The American people can breathe a sigh of relief: there will be no government shutdown,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, after the Senate vote closed about three hours before the deadline. “After trying to take our government hostage, MAGA Republicans won nothing.”

In a statement after Senate passage of the bill, President Biden called it “good news for the American people.” He added, “I fully expect the speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment.”

Members of both parties said they were confident they could win money for Ukraine in the weeks ahead, but the failure to provide any money in the bill was a reflection of diminishing Republican backing for added funding for Kyiv, with some members seeming to side with Russia’s dictator president Vladimir Putin in the war.

It pointed to a potentially nasty fight ahead over funding Ukraine’s war effort, coming on the heels of a visit by President Volodymyr Zelensky to Washington last month to make the case for continued U.S. support. Congress has approved about $113 billion in military, humanitarian and economic aid in four packages since the invasion by Russia. President Biden has requested another $24 billion.

“This bill is a victory for Putin and Putin sympathizers everywhere,” said Representative Mike Quigley of Illinois, the only Democrat to vote against the bill, who said he did so because it did not include aid to Ukraine. “We now have 45 days to correct this grave mistake.”

Hard-right Republicans refused to support the stopgap bill, known as a continuing resolution, because it essentially maintained funding at levels set when Congress was under Democratic control last year.

“Instead of siding with his own party today, Kevin McCarthy sided with 209 Democrats to push through a continuing resolution that maintains the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer spending levels and policies,” Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “He allowed the D.C. Uniparty to win again. Should he remain speaker of the House?”

A much larger contingent of Republicans also refused to back the measure, which also left out severe immigration restrictions many of them demanded.

Before the vote, McCarthy said he recognized that the legislation might spark a challenge to his job but said he was willing to risk it to push a bill through that would keep the government open.

Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who has threatened to try and oust McCarthy, was not willing to reveal his timing. He said, however, that McCarthy’s speakership was “on tenuous ground.”

In the end, Democrats celebrated the outcome.

“Extreme MAGA Republicans have lost,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said as he walked to the House floor to vote in favor of the bill. “The American people have won.”

Democratic Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts joined Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California for a press conference following the House’s passage of legislation to keep the federal government open.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Leader, for those comments and for leading our Caucus and putting the American people’s voice into this process. And, of course, for your hour today, setting out the vision that Democrats have and the contrast with the MAGA extremists,” Clark said. “Democrats have ensured that those interests – the American people – have won out over the demands of MAGA extremists.”

But she said the success came only after months of Speaker McCarthy and the MAGA majority “playing chicken with the lives and livelihoods of the American people.”

“They have brought us to the edge of a needless shutdown, trying to blackmail the country into accepting their extreme, right-wing agenda,” Clark said.

Democrats came to the rescue, she said, with Speaker McCarthy admitting defeat and asking Democrats “to put out the fire that he and his party had started.”

“We proved today that Democrats will continue to unify around our shared values. We will continue to put the concerns of the American people first, and we will not allow the twisted priorities of the MAGA Republicans to become law,” she added. “As we move forward, as the Leader said, we will continue to try and build a budget in a bipartisan way that will meet the needs of the American people and live up to the spending agreement that Kevin McCarthy has already agreed to back in June.”

“And I call on Speaker McCarthy not to let the pro-Putin part of his conference win the day and bring a vote to the Floor on assistance to Ukraine so we can continue to defend their democracy and our own,” she said.

“The day on Capitol Hill was full of twists and turns,” the Times reported.

As House Democrats stalled McCarthy’s plan on the floor to allow time to study it, fire alarms rang out in the Cannon House Office Building, forcing its evacuation. It was later determined that Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, had triggered the alarm, though he claimed it was inadvertent.

“It was like riding a mechanical bull all week,” said Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 House Republican.

Despite the intense effort involved, the stopgap bill is only a temporary solution to the spending fight, which is likely to be quickly rekindled. The House and Senate are both struggling to approve yearlong spending bills and House Republicans have canceled an October break to focus on the spending legislation.

“The gulf on spending between the two parties — and the two chambers — remains vast,” the Times reports.

House Republicans demanded deep spending cuts, cutting aid to Ukraine and immigration restrictions, amid a wave of asylum seekers streaming across the southern border, as the price of any agreement. Senators of both parties argued that Congress should adhere to higher funding levels established in a deal that President Biden negotiated with McCarthy earlier this year, which backed continued assistance to Ukraine.

Before the turn of events on Saturday, federal agencies were bracing to close if no stopgap continuing revolution measure passed by midnight. The armed forces and other so-called “essential” workers such as air traffic controllers and airport security staff would have remained on the job without pay until the standoff was resolved, as well as the United States Park Police, who patrol and guard national parks in the Capital Region.

More dramatically, food and medical assistance to millions of low-income mothers and children would have been in jeopardy, as well as national parks on the cusp of fall weather in the great American outdoors.

House Republicans had demanded a 10 percent reduction in the budget for America’s national parks as part of massive cuts in the federal budget they demanded before agreeing to vote to approve the budget for fiscal year 2024. That would have meant a $433 million cut to the NPS budget even as the Biden administration had been increasing funding to the national parks.

Related: National Parks Set Visitation and Economic Impact Record: Biden Administration Addresses Funding Shortfalls

In the Trump shutdown in 2018-2019, it was estimated that the parks missed out on $400,000 per day in entrance fee revenue. For the looming shutdown, the estimates showed that the Park Service would have lost as much as $1 million a day. Local businesses would have felt the shutdown and the cuts even harder, with an estimated $70 million lost in daily spending, not counting the millions lost in gateway communities to national parks.

The biggest obstacle to a resolution was that the House, where Republicans hold a slim minority, is in the grips of a right-wing, pro-Trump MAGA faction that has made it clear it is willing — perhaps even eager — for a shutdown to drive home its message that Washington is “broken” and federal spending “is out of control.” That bloc known as the Freedom Caucus but we call the Dixie Caucus — since it resembles the Southern coalition of Confederates who voted to succeed from the union in 1861 — refused to back any plan that would even temporarily avert a lapse in federal funding, apparently willing to risk that a segment of the American public would not blame them for being the ones to “break” the federal government.

Facing a choice between a shutdown and the far-right, McCarthy relied on Democrats to dodge a crisis.