The vast bill, adopted definitively on Friday, contains in particular an envelope of $ 45 billion for Ukraine.
MO12345LEMONDE With AFP
The US Congress adopted, Friday, December 23, a vast finance bill for federal services, for a total amount of $ 1,700 billion (1,600 billion euros), including $ 45 billion for ‘Ukraine. After that of the Senate Thursday, the vote by 225 votes against 201 of the House of Representatives makes it possible to avoid the paralysis of the American federal administration (the famous Shutdown), which could have intervened on Friday evening. President Joe Biden still has to promulgate the law with his signature.
“This bill is good for our economy, our competitiveness and our populations-and I will sign it as soon as it is on my desk,” he reacted on Friday in a statement. “This project is an essential text of law, not only to finance the State, to pay our officials, but also to show that the American State works,” said the head of elected democrats in the House, Steny Hoyer said before the vote, .
This budget must finance the functioning of the American federal state – police, diplomacy, armed forces, economic policy, etc. -until September 2023.
The text also includes an amendment to a law dating from the XIX th century in order to mention that the American vice-president cannot intervene directly in the certification of electoral results.
Donald Trump had used the ambiguities of the old text to suggest that Mike Pence, his vice-president, could have stopped the coming to power of Joe Biden after a victory that the outgoing president did not want to recognize: the One of the elements that led to the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mr. Trump, again candidate for 2024, described the text as “abomination” on Thursday, imputing it to the “extreme left”, to the elites of the capital and the lobbies.
rallying of around twenty republicans
With a Democratic majority in the House for a few days, and the next day of a visit by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, warmly welcomed by the vast majority of parliamentarians, the positive outcome of the passage of the text did not make of doubts.
Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the Republicans in the House, had however called the elected officials of his camp to vote against the bill, in order to benefit from a greater room for maneuver on the return of the holidays, when the new majority Republican in the House, from the mid-term elections, will take office. But the Republican senators widely ignored it Thursday afternoon, giving nearly twenty votes to the Democrats to pass the text, with 68 votes against 29, before the Chamber adopted it on Friday.
Before the vote, republican elected representatives of the House of Representatives had spoke to denounce the lack of time granted to them to study the text, finalized three days ago, and criticize the presence of qualified arrangements as “WOKE”, like the financing of projects in support of the LGBT+community. But Mr. McCarthy did not renew his performance last year, when he had held the microphone for eight and a half hours to push the vote, each hoping to reach his family in time for the holidays by avoiding the winter storm which strikes the country.
“We are two days before Christmas,” he said. “The holiday season is the donation season, but, in Congress, it seems that it is that of the filling of pockets for the allies of the Democrats and the stick for the American workers.” Nancy Pelosi, the outgoing president of the Chamber of Representatives, for its part, welcomed the financing of “another significant series of security, economic and humanitarian aid” for Ukraine. “And it is really not – as the president of Ukraine said the other evening – of charity. It is a question of safety, it is a question of working together,” she said.