By Michael Martz

The 118th Congress went out with a flourish in the midnight hour early Saturday when the Senate adopted Social Security reforms that will boost retirement benefits for retired police officers, firefighters and other public employees who have not received their full earnings from jobs they or their spouses worked outside of public service.

In one final push, the U.S. Senate adopted the Social Security Fairness Act, which Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-7th, had helped push through the House of Representatives last month.

The Senate then voted for a short-term spending package that will keep the federal government open through mid-March and provide more than $100 billion in disaster relief for victims of Hurricane Helene in Southwest Virginia and other stricken states in the Southeast.

And for football fans, the Senate gave unanimous consent to legislation that will give the District of Columbia control of RFK Stadium as the potential new home of the Washington Commanders.

Now, the trio of bills only require President Joe Biden to sign them to become law.

“The Senate is delivering good news for Americans: There will be no government shutdown before Christmas,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said just before the Senate swiftly adopted a continuing resolution to finance the government for three months by an 85-11 vote.

Passage of the Social Security Fairness Act will reverse what Schumer called a “mistake” by Congress more than 40 years ago. The legislation repeals the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset. Those provisions reduced the retirement benefits that public employees had earned from other jobs or received after the deaths of their spouses.

The Social Security Fairness Act will boost retirement benefits for more than 50,000 Virginians after Biden signs it into law in the final month of his presidency but add almost $200 billion to the system’s long-term obligations.

“Finally, Congress showed up for the millions of Americans — police officers, firefighters, teachers, federal employees, and other local and state public servants — who worked a second job to care for their families or began a second career to afford to live,” Spanberger and Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., said in a joint statement after the 76-20 vote in the Senate at 12:15 a.m.

“Congress showed up for the hundreds of thousands of widows and widowers who are denied their spouses’ Social Security benefits while grappling with their loss,” they said.

Spanberger, who is leaving Congress to run for governor of Virginia next year, and Graves, who stepped down because of political redistricting of his House seat, had overcome entrenched opposition in the House Ways and Means Committee by securing 218 signatures for a bipartisan discharge petition that brought it to the House floor in mid-November for a 327-75 vote.

In the Senate, they teamed with Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who lost his seat in the November election, as well as Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who had introduced a similar bill in the Senate.

“For Abigail and Sherrod, this will be their last victory as members of the House and Senate,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said in an interview earlier this week. “It’s not a modest one. It’s a big one.”

Veteran Richmond political commentator Bob Holsworth said the vote will also give Spanberger’s gubernatorial campaign a big boost from public employees who face vows by President-elect Donald Trump and billionaire businessman Elon Musk to slash the size of the federal workforce.

They have vowed to move up to 100,000 employees out of the Washington, D.C., region, including the Northern Virginia suburbs that depend on them economically.

“It’s going to present Spanberger as a person who has the backs of public employees at a time when they are going to come under unrelenting assault,” Holsworth said.

Repealing the Social Security provisions was the top priority of the Fraternal Order of Police, which blasted Rep. Bob Good, R-5th, after he attempted to table the measure in an Election Day maneuver that House Republicans later reversed. The FOP led a chorus of other public employee unions in praise of the Senate vote on the legislation on Saturday morning.

“A happy morning for more than 2.8 million Americans!” retired Danville firefighter David L. Brown Jr. said in an email after the vote.

Pediatric cancer research

Kaine, who had co-sponsored the legislation in the Senate, also celebrated with retiring Rep. Jennifer Wexton, D-10th, the Senate’s passage by unanimous consent of the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act, which will reauthorize pediatric cancer research for five years.

The measure was originally part of a bipartisan stopgap budget deal between House Republicans and Democrats. Trump and Musk torpedoed that package in part because it did not include raising the national debt ceiling to make room for the new president’s tax cut plans.

The pediatric cancer research was one of the measures dropped from the continuing resolution, which would have reauthorized the program at the National Institutes of Health for seven years.

Miller was a 10-year-old Leesburg girl in Wexton’s district who died in 2013 of an inoperable brain tumor but advocated strongly for pediatric cancer research.

Wexton, who is retiring next month because of her own serious medical condition, progressive supranuclear palsy, said the bill’s passage has been a priority since she entered Congress six years ago.

“I’m so proud that we’ve finally gotten this lifesaving bill through Congress and on its way to be signed into law,” she said in an announcement with Kaine on Saturday morning.

“This bipartisan bill will build on the groundbreaking work of the Kids First program and deliver much-needed resources to better understand, treat, and hopefully one day cure childhood cancer.”

Kaine, who spoke on the Senate floor after brokering an agreement with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to lift his objection to the funding, said, “Gabriella Miller was a courageous Virginian who gave her all to advocate for those whose lives have been touched by childhood cancer.”

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., joined Kaine in backing the measure, as well as the Social Security reforms and the short-term spending bill.

“We are relieved Congress passed legislation to avert a government shutdown, which would have had disastrous consequences for federal employees, government contractors, and millions of Americans who rely on government services,” they said in a joint statement early Saturday.