Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said both he and the White House are on board Speaker Mike Johnson’s bill to avoid a government shutdown.
“The proposal before the House does two things Democrats pushed for,” Schumer told reporters. “We all want to avoid a shutdown. I talked to the White House and both of us agree, the White House and myself, that if this can avoid a shutdown it’ll be a good thing.”
The New York Democrat said he had negotiated some of the particulars of the stopgap spending package in talks with Johnson, including making sure that there were no cuts in the bill and that it would put defense funding in the latter of two set spending deadlines.
Still, Schumer called the two-tiered deadline — one in mid-January and the other in early February — “goofy” and made clear it’s not how he would have written a government funding patch.
