US Senate Reaches Agreement Avoiding a Government Shutdown

Funding for public services has been assured for six weeks in spite of the pressures coming from the Tea Party.

If not for its dramatic consequences, political life in Washington could be treated like a bad comedy. Once again, for the third time this year, the federal government was threatened with closure because of budgetary conflicts with Tea Party origins. Democrats and Republicans in Congress were once again forced to reach an urgent agreement to fund public services, which would have been left without money and would have had to end their activities if an agreement had not been reached this week. The agreement finally came early Tuesday morning.

The Senate, which has a majority of Democrats, passed the bill with the following result: 79 votes for and 12 against. Democrats and Republicans agreed on the bill, which assures the funding of the U.S. government for six weeks, until Nov. 18, according to EFE reports.

The problem is that the United States has become an ungovernable country ever since Republicans won the legislative elections in 2010 and gained control of the House of Representatives with the indispensable help of a powerful group of lawmakers coming from the Tea Party. This group has decided to be consistent with its radical programs.

In this condition, the government is unable to get an annual budget off the ground, and whenever the date of partial authorization of federal expenditure arrives, it has to face the drastic conditions that the Tea Party has imposed on Congress. It happened in April when it came to time to fund the government until October, and it happened again this summer in order to raise the debt ceiling.

Now the government needs money, and the situation repeated itself. Being pressed by a bipartisan Congressional committee with executive power, an extension until Nov. 18 has finally been approved, with the hope that a definitive agreement about an annual budget will be reached.

On this occasion, the argument had to do with the money that the government uses to help victims of natural disasters. This is a country in which, every year, a natural tragedy is registered somewhere in its vast and diverse geography. Hurricanes, tornadoes and catastrophic storms are as common in some areas as are droughts and earthquakes in others. The consequent results are flooding and destruction of houses and crops. Currently, the agency devoted to helping victims, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is spending between $30 and $40 million to assist people affected by Hurricane Irene, the hurricane that devastated the East Coast of the country this summer.

Tea Party Congressmen do not like spending public money, not even when it comes to helping disaster victims. When the government check had to be made out, they took advantage of the situation and imposed a condition that cut FEMA’s budget. According to them, FEMA is just another bureaucratic institution that is useful only for feeding lazy civil servants.

Pressured by Republican leaders themselves, Tea Party members agreed to leave the $3.5 billion dollars in natural disaster aid in place in exchange for having that same amount extracted from the budget by reducing other environmental protection programs, such as incentives to produce low-energy vehicles or solar energy.