By
Ed Kilgore,
political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
Lights out later on?
To the amazement of anyone familiar with recent struggles to keep the federal government humming along, a bipartisan stopgap spending bill easily overcame the first and biggest Senate hurdle yesterday, cutting off any possible filibuster by a 89-4 vote. Though the measure put together by Democratic and Republican appropriators had some pretty conspicuous concessions to the minority party (notably, omission of any new money for ICE and a pause on a new Russell Vought–proposed mechanism for political vetting of grants to the states), the only Republican to vote against it was Rand Paul, who votes against every spending bill. Not a peep was heard from the White House.
