Congress approves stopgap measure with hours before lapse in government funding
Source: Washington Post
Congress on Friday evening approved a two-day extension in funding for the federal government to give lawmakers more time to resolve the remaining sticking points on a $900 billion coronavirus relief package. The measure was quickly approved within hours by both the House and Senate on Friday evening. President Trump still has to sign the measure into law.
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said Friday evening that there were “still some significant issues outstanding” in the way of a coronavirus relief deal. Hoyer added that House lawmakers should not expect to vote earlier than Sunday at 1 p.m. The two-day funding measure passed the House by a 320 to 60 vote margin, with all the no votes coming from Republican lawmakers and Rep. Justin Amash (L-Mich.). The measure passed the Senate unanimously. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) temporarily held up the vote and on the Senate floor urged lawmakers to approve another round of stimulus payments, but quickly withdrew his objections after a short speech.
Congressional leaders will still continue to work on the larger stimulus package with the hopes of announcing a deal, possibly as soon as Friday night, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal planning. The short-term spending bill gives lawmakers time to review the bill before voting on it either over the weekend or at the beginning of next week. The duration of the stopgap and Hoyer’s announcement of Sunday votes raises the likelihood that the vast majority of lawmakers will be asked to vote on a bill spending more than $2 trillion and likely running many hundreds of pages with only hours to review it.
Asked about the appearance of holding such a swift vote, Hoyer said he was not "nearly as worried as I am about the optics of thousands of people in food lines and millions of people worried about how they’re going to pay the rent ... how they’re going to survive the next day. Much more worried about that.”
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/12/18/government-funding-likely-expire-friday-night-congress-tries-complete-stimulus-deal/
Thankfully a reprieve for government employees.
= new reply since forum marked as read
but I haven't gotten into the weeds of the language that they are drafting. Some reporting on that here (the issuing obviously being the old and lumbering state UI systems 
) -
Published Fri, Dec 18 20203:45 PM EST
Alicia Adamczyk
(snip)
But even if Congress manages to pass a bill before the benefits officially expire on Dec. 26, “it takes usually around two to three weeks to turn benefits back on,” says Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. That means that starting next week, the millions of people currently receiving PUA and long-term benefits will at least temporarily lose their weekly payments.
That’s because each state operates its own UI system, and it takes time to get them running each time the law changes, says Evermore. This same dynamic played out earlier this year, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order to use funds from FEMA to provide an extra $300 in benefits for a few weeks, after enhanced benefits of $600 per week expired at the end of July. It took some states months to get the extra funds to those who were eligible.
That said, while there may be a lag in actually receiving the payments, there should not be a gap in eligibility, Evermore wrote in a blog post. So when states are able to start making payments, they should be retroactive to the start date in the final bill.
Again, all of this will depend on what Congress actually includes in the bill, and if and when it passes. Currently, unemployment benefits are reportedly one of the sticking points in negotiations: Already, the bill being negotiated has reportedly changed from providing 16 additional weeks of UI to 10.
(snip)
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/18/millions-to-lose-jobless-benefits-temporarily-even-with-covid-deal.html
It's something that Newt Gingrich dreamed up over 40 years ago and it has come to fruition (and he's still behind the scenes stirring the cauldron of dispair). 
I post this over and over... 
Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements.
Story by McKay Coppins
November 2018 Issue
Updated on October 17, 2018
[snip]
On June 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution.
“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.” For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.
The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.”
But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”
[snip]
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/
It is so frustrating. This year has literally been a nightmare although the light at the end of tunnel is January 20, 2021 at 12:01 pm.
Am hanging in there and hope you and yours are coping okay and will have pleasant holidays coming up.
and every time I read an article or listen to the news on the radio, I hear new things pop up that were added and other things that were shifted and modified or removed... Basically all the "sausage making". They are trying to do a "win-win" so they can tout things "gained" for each party's base.
It's sortof like what happened with the ACA over a year's time - the media was always reporting on what they claimed was "the bill", neglecting to say that what they were talking about was a "draft" version from just one committee in one chamber (and there were at least 6 committees working on "drafts" ).
I know a few days ago they were talking about splitting stuff off into a separate second bill (the most contentious stuff) so am hoping they consider just doing that and get the main funding out to people in need (am guessing each side is jockeying based on what will or may be a change in their chamber's party membership come January, so they are trying to get as much bang for the buck from their current members)!
ETA - that is the gist behind this -
