Highlights: Congress passes bill to keep the government open, averting a shutdown

GOP Sens. Roger Marshall and Bill Hagerty said they voted no on the CR because it didn't include additional funding for border security.

"The CR does nothing to address our most immediate national security threat- our open southern border & the fentanyl pouring in," Marshall said. "With a $33 trillion debt crisis, it’s never been more clear America can’t afford to continue these spending levels for one more day, let alone, 45."

"During negotiations around a Continuing Resolution, I made very clear that I wouldn’t support any short-term funding bill that didn’t include serious border-security measures to help put an end to the Biden Border crisis, & I’m keeping that commitment," said Hagerty.

While DOD has exhausted much of its security assistance funding for Ukraine, there is enough Presidential Drawdown Authority available to meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs “for a bit longer,” a U.S. official tells NBC News. The White House expects another PDA soon on the normal cadence, the official said.

This person stressed, however, that the White House will need a Ukraine funding bill to pass “soon” and it’s “imperative” that Speaker McCarthy keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine to ensure that happens.

Congress has until Nov. 17 to resolve their differences and avoid another shutdown, but it’s not clear they will.

The House passed four appropriations bills (three of them just this week, with a fourth failing). All include deep spending cuts that Senate Democrats and Biden will never accept. The Senate had a bipartisan blueprint, which they're saying led to tonight's result — a clean CR — but it's hard to see the Republican-controlled House agreeing to 12 bipartisan funding bills in the next two months.

It's worth noting: Congress runs out of money every year on Sept. 30. This wasn't a surprise. They had nearly 10 months to fund the government and didn't.

Republicans in Congress had a deal with the White House on spending levels earlier this year that was supposed to avoid this whole crisis. Speaker McCarthy ripped it up to please his far-right flank — and some conservatives are still threatening his job.

Shortly after the vote, Schumer and McConnell released a statement urging the need to pass additional funding for Ukraine, which was left out of the SR. The statement was co-signed by Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, as well as Chris Coons of Delaware and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who head the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs.

"In the coming weeks, we expect the Senate will work to ensure the U.S. government continues to provide critical and sustained security and economic support for Ukraine," the statement said. "We support Ukraine’s efforts to defend its sovereignty against Putin’s brazen aggression, and we join a strong bipartisan majority of our colleagues in this essential work. With the eyes of our partners, allies, and adversaries upon us, we keenly understand the importance of American leadership and are committed to strengthening it from Europe to the Indo-Pacific."

President Joe Biden released a statement immediately following the Senate's CR passage, lauding the bill as "preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans."

Directing his attention to McCarthy and House Republicans, he said. "But I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place. Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis. For weeks, extreme House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed."

Biden added that while there is no new funding for Ukraine in the stopgap measure, "We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted. I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment."

The Senate voted 88-9 on Saturday night to pass a short-term bill to keep the government open, averting a shutdown at the last minute after a dramatic turnaround in the waning hours.

The bill, which passed the House earlier by a substantial bipartisan vote of 335-91, now goes to President Joe Biden, who is expected to sign it into law.

The legislation keeps the government funded at existing levels through Nov. 17 and authorizes additional disaster relief money, giving Congress more time to reach a full-year funding agreement. That will still be a towering challenge ahead of the new November deadline, but it avoids for now a shutdown that would have put pay for millions of Americans in jeopardy.

The deal excludes aid to Ukraine, a provision from the bipartisan Senate bill that Speaker Kevin McCarthy axed, saying it should be considered separately at a time to be determined.

Read the full story here.