Outgoing Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) stoked fears that the government might shut down in an attempt to confirm a group of President Obama’s nominees by unanimous consent before Republicans take control of the Senate, according to a Senate aide.
“That speech Reid gave this morning was a total fabrication,” Brian Phillips, a spokesman for Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) tells National Review Online, referring to the top Democrat’s suggestion that conservative senators were refusing to allow a vote to keep the government open.
The shutdown was averted on Saturday afternoon, when the Senate agreed to pass a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government before it ran out of money at midnight. “They could have done that last night at 9 o’clock,” Phillips says. “We told our leadership last night that we did not have a problem with a voice vote on a five-day short-term CR.”
What they did oppose, though, is granting unanimous consent to confirm a bloc of Obama’s nominees. At the same time, the Senate conservatives are pushing for a procedural vote on the $1.1 trillion cromnibus that, if passed, would withhold funding for the implementation of Obama’s executive orders on immigration. To that end, they are refusing to expedite a cloture vote that would allow the Senate to take up the cromnibus.
“They could have brought anything up for a vote, they just didn’t want to because we didn’t let them have their [unanimous consent],” Phillips says. “Harry Reid throws this temper tantrum and wants to do all these procedural votes today and keep members here and then lie to the media about threatening a shutdown when he knew as of 9 o’clock last night that Lee and Cruz and Republicans were not going to hold up a voice vote on a short-term CR.”