Vermont’s congressional delegation celebrated the eleventh-hour deal struck over the weekend to fund the federal government for 45 days, narrowly avoiding a widely dreaded government shutdown.
Crucially to Vermont as it continues to reel from this summer’s disastrous flooding, the stopgap spending bill passed late Saturday replenishes the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund. With a $16 billion top-off, the agency can continue doling out federal aid to areas affected by natural disasters.
But Vermont’s three members of Congress didn’t let the moment pass without chastising U.S. House Republicans, whose infighting stalled a spending deal until just hours before Congress’s Saturday night deadline.
Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., told VTDigger last week that she and fellow House Democrats had been locked out of budget negotiations with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as he attempted to wrangle a handful of his caucus’s furthest-right members.
“He’s essentially putting his own power ahead of what is better for the country, and that’s really ugly to watch,” Balint said in a phone interview last Monday.
It was only in the final hours before a shutdown that McCarthy — unable to appease the arch-conservative members of the House Freedom Caucus — reached across the aisle to court support from Democrats. The budget bill, which generally extends current spending levels for the next month and a half, ultimately passed with bipartisan, bicameral support, including from Balint.
After casting her yes vote, though, Vermont’s first-term House member admonished Republicans for what she called their “reckless behavior and lack of seriousness.” That, she said, “put real families at risk and threatened critical disaster relief funding.”
“My most basic responsibility to Vermonters and all Americans is to ensure that working people have the resources they need to support their families,” Balint said in a written statement Saturday. “Funding that will make it possible to recover from flooding, receive quality education, have access to food assistance for their children, and be paid for military service.”
U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., also celebrated the weekend’s successful votes to fund the government as “great news for our state” — but added in a written statement late Saturday, “It should have never required an 11th-hour vote to keep the government open.”
“This unnecessary weeks-long uncertainty put the financial health and wellbeing of Vermonters, and the American economy, in harm’s way,” Welch continued. “The American people deserve a better-functioning Congress. Shutdown threats hurt the integrity of our democracy and the faith the American people have in this institution.”
Democrats didn’t come out of the budget votes unscathed. The bill passed Saturday did not include military aid for Ukraine as the country continues to fend off the Russian invasion — a major concession that both U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Welch bemoaned after casting their ‘yes’ votes.
“I look forward to seeing Congress provide, in the very near future, financial support for Ukraine which is valiantly struggling against Russian aggression,” Sanders wrote in a statement Saturday.
Congress will get another opportunity to debate the United States’ obligations to Ukraine and other spending proposals sooner rather than later.
“Now that we have averted a shutdown and held the line on extreme MAGA spending cuts, it’s time we move past political games and put the American people first,” Balint wrote Saturday. “Otherwise, we will find ourselves back in the same situation in 45 days, only causing more chaos and uncertainty.”
