Congress Weighs Short-Term Budget Fix to Avert Government Shutdown
FoxNews.com
Published December 17, 2010
Congress on Friday desperately sought a way to keep the federal government from shutting down this weekend after the Senate ditched a 2,000-page catchall spending bill loaded with more than $8 billion in home-state projects known as earmarks in Washington.
The government is careening toward a temporary shutdown at 12:01 a.m. Sunday unless President Obama signs a spending bill into law.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the lower chamber will vote on a spending bill Friday afternoon to keep the government open through Tuesday.
But some House leadership sources told Fox News they could and should vote on a temporary spending bill that would keep the government afloat until February in part because 63 defeated Democrats have no offices and no place to go. They would like to go home, the sources said.
In the upper chamber, senators are still trying to figure out what to do after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave up on a $1.27 trillion bill on Thursday when several Republicans who had been thinking of voting for it pulled back their support.
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