WASHINGTON, DC — In response to the impending government shutdown deadline, the Senate swiftly passed a bipartisan plan early Saturday. This plan is designed to fund federal operations and provide disaster aid temporarily.
“Tonight, the Senate delivers more good news for America. There will be no government shutdown right before Christmas,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on the Senate floor ahead of final passage.
The House approved the new bill from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA.) by a significant margin, with a vote of 366-34. The Senate also passed the bill, with a vote of 85-11, just after the midnight deadline.
The streamlined 118-page package will fund the government at existing levels until March 14 and includes an additional $100 billion in disaster aid and $10 billion in agricultural assistance for farmers.
Notably, the bill does not include President-elect Donald Trump's request to raise the debt ceiling, which GOP leaders indicated will be discussed next year as part of their tax and border proposals.
Trump derailed bipartisan congressional budget negotiations by dismissing the original proposal, claiming it favored Democrats and was laden with excessive spending. This reaction followed social media posts from billionaire Elon Musk.
Musk urged his followers to "Stop the steal of your tax dollars!" on his platform X, suggesting potential primary challenges for those who supported the budget deal. Trump later echoed this sentiment in his own social media post.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said it looked like Musk, who is heading up the new Department of Government Efficiency, was calling the shots for Trump and Republicans.
“Who is in charge?” she asked during the debate.
Lawmakers expressed relief after the bill's passage. Still, the narrow escape from a potential shutdown raised concerns among some Republicans about the challenges that may arise next year, particularly with Republicans holding an even slimmer majority in the House and Trump back in office.
President Joe Biden, who maintained a lower public profile during the tumultuous week, anticipated signing the measure into law on Saturday.
Some critics argue that Trump does not share the same apprehension about government shutdowns as lawmakers do, pointing to his role in initiating the longest government shutdown in history during his first term.
A government shutdown occurs when the necessary funding legislation to finance the federal government is not approved before the start of the next fiscal year. During a shutdown, the federal government reduces agency activities and services, halts non-essential operations, furloughs non-essential employees, and retains only essential staff in departments responsible for safeguarding human life or property.
The most significant government shutdowns include:
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The 16-day shutdown in 2013 during the Barack Obama administration resulted from a disagreement over implementing the Affordable Care Act.
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The 21-day shutdown of 1995–1996, during President Bill Clinton’s administration, over opposition to major spending cuts.
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Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.