US Government shutdown: House approves bill, US President Donald Trump to sign short and reopen Government

The House has approved a funding bill that is now on its way to US President Donald Trump’s desk to reopen the Government, ending the longest shutdown in the country’s history.

In the House, 222 Representatives, which included six Democrats, approved the motion, with 209 Representatives, comprising of 2 Republicans and 207 Democrats, voting against the bill in a last ditch effort to keep the US Government shutdown.

The funding bill, which was revised to get through the Senate, will now be taken to the White House for Mr Trump to sign.

His signature will officially reopen the US Government.

House Democrats remain adamantly opposed, angered by the Senate deal that came less than a week after Democrats won high-profile elections in New Jersey, Virginia and New York City that many thought strengthened their odds of winning an extension of health insurance subsidies. While the deal sets up a December vote on those subsidies in the Senate, Speaker Mike Johnson has made no such promise in the House.

Despite the recriminations, neither party appears to have won a clear victory. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday found that 50 per cent of Americans blamed Republicans, while 47 per cent blamed Democrats.

The vote came on the Republican-controlled House’s first day in session since mid-September, a long recess intended to put pressure on Democrats in the shutdown standoff. The chamber’s return also set the clock ticking on a vote to release all unclassified records related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, something Johnson and Trump have resisted up to now.

Mr Johnson on Wednesday swore in Democrat Adelita Grijalva, who won a September special election to fill the Arizona seat of her late father, Raul Grijalva. She provided the final signature needed for a petition to force a House vote on the issue, hours after House Democrats released a new batch of Epstein documents.

That means that after performing its constitutionally mandated duty of keeping the government funded, the House could once again be consumed by a probe into Mr Trump’s former friend whose life and 2019 death in prison have spawned countless conspiracy theories.

The funding package would allow eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the federal investigation of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters.

It retroactively makes it illegal in most cases to obtain a senator’s phone data without disclosure and allows those whose records were obtained to sue the Justice Department for $US500,000 ($A764,000) in damages, along with lawyers’ fees and other costs.