Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t go into detail but acknowledged the difficult path he took to getting the spending bill across the finish line. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo McConnell secures budget deal with ‘begging, pleading and cajoling’ The Senate majority leader obtained passage of a massive omnibus spending package after convincing Sens. Rand Paul and Jim Risch to drop their procedural objections.

First there were Rand Paul’s objections. Then Jim Risch’s. But finally at 12:39 a.m. on Friday, the Senate passed a bill funding the government through September and went home after a chaotic 12 hours of drama.

The chamber voted 65-32 to pass the $1.3 trillion spending package and send it to President Donald Trump. But it was a tricky road to avoid a government shutdown, requiring Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to privately telephone Paul and let him vent about the Senate rules, then satisfy Risch’s objections to a wilderness area being named after a dead Idaho governor.


“This is ridiculous. This is juvenile,” fumed Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who asked McConnell for an explanation of why the chamber was in at midnight. “What has occurred over the last 11 hours that keeps us here voting on a bill that we all know is going to pass?”

McConnell didn’t go into detail but acknowledged the difficult path he took to getting the spending bill across the finish line.

“My principal responsibility is begging, pleading and cajoling. I have been in continuous discussions, shall I say, with several of our members who were legitimately unhappy,” McConnell said.

That’s putting it mildly.

Paul kept everyone in suspense that he might shut the government down again — but he backed off late Thursday night after a private conversation with McConnell. The junior GOP senator from Kentucky spent the day refusing to rule out forcing another brief government shutdown in opposition to a return to “Obama spending and trillion-dollar deficits.”

But after a call with McConnell around 10 p.m., Paul said he would let the bill go through, a show of pragmatism that was not on display last month when Paul caused an hours-long lapse in government funding.

"It's never really been about how long we stay here. But it is to a certain extent, when you lose, trying to draw attention to your cause," Paul told reporters as the clock neared midnight. "We look for victories any way we can, knowing that we don't have the votes to win."

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Paul said he pressed McConnell on allowing more amendments and debate in the Senate, as the spending bill was written by congressional leaders in private. Paul said he had got some sort of "commitment" to open things up but was vague on what McConnell had promised.

"There are never any amendments on anything, and it's very closed process. The bills are developed behind closed doors with very little input from rank and file. So I think I got that message across," Paul said. "I hope it will be better."

But once Paul was taken care of, the ornery Risch was next. The Idaho Republican protested moving forward on the bill because it renamed an Idaho park after Cecil D. Andrus, a former Democratic governor and sometime political foe, who died last year, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Risch was under the impression that the renaming would not be in the bill, according to a GOP senator. But Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) helped direct the renaming of the White Clouds Wilderness in the omnibus, and Risch was furious to read the bill and find it in there. McConnell and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) met with Risch privately about the matter to try to calm him.

The Senate approved a technical change to the bill striking the renaming, but Simpson is insisting the provision stay in the bill, senators said. Risch refused to speak about it.

“I don’t have any comment,” he told reporters.

Still, Risch's complaints were overshadowed most of Thursday by Paul, whom fellow senators were trying desperately to persuade to not cause another shutdown.

Paul was noncommittal on Thursday as he walked into a Republican Caucus lunch. He said he had more than 2,000 pages of the 2,200-page bill left to get through before he would decide how to proceed. A few hours later, he tweeted that he was on page 207 of the “monstrous” bill and began singling out pieces of the bill for criticism, stopping at 600 pages before going on Fox News at 8:30 p.m., where he continued to trash the bill and play coy about his intentions.

Republicans had hoped that they could produce the spending deal much earlier this week to evade Paul's procedural protests and give the Senate time to pass the bill without the possibility of a shutdown.

But top congressional leaders released the bill at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, infuriating Paul and other conservatives who say that did not leave nearly enough time to review the legislation.

The will-he-or-won’t-he cause a momentary shutdown was a familiar play from Paul. He loves using Senate rules to draw attention to his causes — even if it means agitating the people he goes to work with everyday. He has filibustered nominees, briefly caused a surveillance program to lapse and, in February, refused to give GOP leaders consent to vote on a funding bill before the funding deadline, causing a brief shutdown.

There was no concerted effort at the Republican lunch Thursday to persuade Paul to back down, attendees said. But GOP leaders and individual senators tried to prevail on Paul to play nice.

“It’s fair to say that it’s fine to make a statement,” said Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), who dislikes the spending increases in the bill but was eager to vote on it. “There’s no benefit to waiting at this point. We should go ahead and get it done.”

And the massive bill’s late unveiling contributed to the impasse with Risch, who was surprised to find Andrus' name in the spending bill.

Senators weren’t even quite sure if Risch was satisfied or what had been done to accommodate him. A source familiar with the matter said the renaming of the wilderness area after Andrus is unlikely to become law unless the House approves a technical change.

Both Risch and Paul were empowered by Senate rules, which required all 100 senators to agree hold a vote before the Friday night shutdown deadline. The House cleared the massive spending measure on Thursday.

The must-pass nature of the spending bill also contributed to the late-night fights.

“This is a ridiculous process that we go through where people extort us until we get so tired that we’re willing to do whatever it is they wish for us to do,” Corker said.

Beyond simply annoying other senators, the protests threatened to disrupt trips some of them are planning to take overseas as part of congressional delegations. There were multiple so-called CODELs scheduled to leave on Thursday night, and they made contingency plans as it became clear Thursday would be a late night, according to a Republican senator.

But GOP leaders believed all along that the looming recess — and the certainty that the bill will pass, just a matter of when — would be enough to get Paul not to gum up the works again and keep the Senate from a third shutdown this year. It took a a few painful hours to get there, but they ended up being right.

“There are some unhappy folks, understandably. And they should be, the way this stuff gets done,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.). “But in the end you realize we’ve got to fund the government and it’s kind of an inevitability.”

Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.