House Passes Short-Term Spending Bill, Setting Up Shutdown Battle in Senate<br />WASHINGTON — The House approved a stopgap spending bill on Thursday night to keep the government open past Friday,<br />but Senate Democrats — angered by President Trump’s vulgar aspersions and a lack of progress on a broader budget and immigration deal — appeared ready to block the measure.<br />“Three strikes, you’re out,” he said, adding, “I guess the speaker has the best plan, and so we’ll just see how that works out.”<br />But shortly before the vote on Thursday night, the Freedom Caucus announced<br />that it had decided to support the stopgap bill, having extracted other concessions from the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin.<br />The Senate held only a procedural vote on the stopgap bill late Thursday night, leaving<br />for Friday a more consequential vote when Democrats are expected to block the measure.<br />Republican leaders had spent Wednesday pressuring Democrats to vote for the spending bill, arguing<br />that opposing it would effectively block the extension of the child health program, known as CHIP, which they had included in the spending bill.<br />If Senate Republicans were unified in support and continued to lack the vote of Senator John McCain of Arizona,<br />they would still need at least 10 Democrats to join them for the bill to succeed in that chamber.<br />Mr. Tester, who is up for re-election this year in a state that Mr. Trump won by 20 percentage points, denounced the stopgap bill as a “disgrace.”<br />“We keep doing patches and patches and patches and I’m done,” he said, adding: “We have to do our job, for God’s sake!
