The House has now officially passed the stopgap government funding bill to avert a shutdown at midnight.

The final vote was 254 to 175, with 34 Republicans joining all 220 Democrats to get the bill passed. A simple majority of 218 votes was needed to pass the bill.

The measure passed the Senate earlier today, so the bill now goes to the desk of Joe Biden, who is expected to quickly sign it and thus prevent a shutdown.

The bill will keep the government funded at its current levels through December 3, giving Congress more time to negotiate over a more comprehensive piece of legislation.

It remains unclear whether the House will also vote today on the infrastructure bill, as dozens of progressives insist they will oppose the legislation until the reconciliation package passes as well.

The US government went into Thursday embroiled in a game of three-dimensional chess with time running out and trillions of dollars at stake.

The first dimension was a must-do: fund the government by midnight to avoid it shutting down. In a typical shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal employees stop getting paid and many stop working; some services are suspended and numerous national attractions and national parks temporarily close.

The second dimension is an even bigger must-do: raise the national debt ceiling, an artificially imposed borrowing limit, before an estimated deadline of 18 October. Failure to pay its bills would see the US default for the first time in history. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has warned that the effects would be “cataclysmic” and cost 6m jobs.

The third dimension is not quite a must but it feels that way to Joe Biden and Democrats: pass a $1tn bipartisan infrastructure bill and a $3.5tn partisan package that expands social services and tackles the climate crisis. Both are currently stalled by divisions between Democratic centrists and progressives, along with Republican eagerness to deny Biden a win.

The US government’s power is spread across executive (the president), legislative (Congress), and judicial (supreme court and other courts) branches, which ensures checks and balances but can also get messy quickly.
 
While Democrats hold the presidency and both chambers of Congress, their margins in the latter are razor-thin. The Senate is evenly split 50-50, with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, holding the tiebreaker vote. Democrats have a 220-212 margin in the House of Representatives so can only afford a handful of defections.

Comparisons between Biden and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s were therefore somewhat fanciful since Roosevelt enjoyed much more comfortable majorities to rubber-stamp his priorities. Biden has the power of persuasion but not much else.