The Senate decided to defer the fight over President Donald Trump's border wall until next year, when Democrats will take over the House. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Congress Senate passes short-term spending bill to avert shutdown The bill now goes to the House, where it's expected to be approved.

The Senate passed a short-term spending bill on Wednesday night to avoid a partial government shutdown, kicking a fight with President Donald Trump over border wall funding until next year.

The legislation was passed by voice vote and will keep the government open until Feb. 8, provided the House will pass it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the Senate will remain in session on Thursday pending House action on the spending bill; on Wednesday evening conservatives in the House urged the rejection of the legislation because it shorts the border wall.


"We have to see what the House does with what we just sent them," McConnell said. Senators have been urged to stay in D.C. on Thursday by party leaders.

But the House is expected to vote on the package Thursday — a full day ahead of the deadline — and there it will likely have broad support from both parties, according to multiple aides.

With Trump softening his demands for $5 billion for the wall in the waning days of the GOP Congress, McConnell (R-Ky.) worked to avoid a political blunder four days before Christmas. Democrats and some Republicans had advocated for longer-term deals on all the government departments except for the Department of Homeland Security, but Trump's demands for $5 billion in border wall funding have made broad funding deals difficult.

Instead the chamber decided to defer the fight until next year, when Democrats will take over the House.

“It’s good that our Republican colleagues in the Senate finally realized that they should not shut down the government over a wall that does not have enough support to pass the House or Senate," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Still the night was not without drama. Several Western senators held up the spending bill until late Wednesday evening trying to get a public lands bill passed, but Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) blocked passage of it over a dispute over his state's treatment under the measure. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she had commitments to bring the bill up next year, but Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) said he was "doggone upset" that Lee didn't allow the bill to pass on Wednesday as senators prepared to pack it in for the year.

But eventually, the spending bill passed without any dissent by voice vote. The quick vote was evidence that few in the Senate wanted to fight about the border wall late into the holiday season with the president sending mixed messages about what he would sign and if he was still "proud" to shut the government down.

It has been a week of about-faces for the White House that have induced whiplash on Capitol Hill. Though Trump declared he would absorb the blame if he didn’t get the wall funding he has been demanding, it now appears he is willing to sign a short-term funding measure.

Leaving lunch with Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the president would sign the bill if it remained clean.

“He’s not happy about having to do this, but he’d be especially unhappy if there were other things people were asking for,” he said.

Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to the president, told Fox News on Wednesday morning that the “president is not going to back down” from his fight for border security, but she declined to rule out Trump signing the stopgap spending bill. “We’ll see what the Senate and the House present to the president,” she said.

Though White House aides insist the president is not backing down, their public statements appear to be easing the way for him to keep the government open even if he doesn’t get the money he wants for a border wall.

Conway gave the latest indication of that on Wednesday. “The [continuing resolution] to keep the government going until Feb. 8 is what they’re looking at now, but that does not change whatsoever two important facts. One, that this president believes his first and solemn duty is to keep us safe, and that includes enhanced border security,” she said. “And second, it does not change the fact that this border is so porous that all it’s done is gotten worse since those Democrats voted for border security 12 years ago. So this president is not going to back down from that.”

Her statement came after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that the president had instructed his Cabinet secretaries to search for spare money within their agencies that could be repurposed for a border wall — a move that is unlikely to produce funds amounting to the $5 billion Trump is seeking.

Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rejected an offer from McConnell on Tuesday because it provided $1 billion more than they were willing to accept for border security, deeming it a “slush fund.” With effective veto power over any deal and no appetite to hand Trump a political win, Democrats have not budged in recent days in their demands that Homeland Security funding stay flat, and in their insistence that they will give no more than $1.3 billion for border fencing.

Pelosi declared support for the short-term package on Wednesday, calling the failed talks a “missed opportunity.”

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McConnell attributed Democrats’ refusal to agree to a permanent funding measure to malevolence.

“It seems like political spite for the president may be winning out over sensible policy, even sensible policies that are more modest than border security allocations which many Democrats supported themselves, in the recent past,” McConnell said, needling Democrats for their “allergy to sensible immigration policies.”

When the latest funding bill is approved, Congress will have delayed the border wall fight three times since September.

The punt sets up yet another confrontation for early next year, when Pelosi is expected to take over the House majority as speaker and will start with yet another immediate funding deadline upon her. But there’s no reason to expect Democrats to give in next year: In fact, without a GOP Congress there’s almost no chance Trump will get more border funding, absent a broader deal on immigration.

Pelosi will take the mantle in January with a fresh chance to unite her caucus around defying Trump. She and her lieutenants have repeatedly said they will try to jam Senate Republicans with funding bills stripped of new wall funding, pressuring McConnell to put them on the floor or risk a funding lapse on the GOP’s terms.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who will become House majority leader in January, suggested the House would pass a bipartisan six-bill package early next year that also freezes funding for the Department of Homeland Security — yet another punt on a broader immigration fight.

“We’re not going to get Homeland done,” Hoyer told reporters Tuesday when asked about next year. “The wall’s not going to be resolved.”

This week’s bill will not include any emergency disaster relief for communities ravaged by wildfires in California or struck by Hurricane Michael in Florida, according to multiple aides.

Lawmakers from both California and Florida had been pushing hard for billions of dollars for disaster aid in a year-end spending deal, something that GOP spending leaders in both the House and Senate had vowed to deliver. Money was also expected to go to Indonesia, where an earthquake and tsunami killed more than 2,100 people this fall.

The short-term funding bill will also postpone into the next Congress a monthslong fight over reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. The domestic violence law will be renewed until Feb. 8, without the dramatic overhaul that many House Democrats have sought.

The National Flood Insurance Program — a debt-ridden program drained by a string of natural disasters in recent years — will also be extended through that date.

