Telling you that the U.S. government is going to be open for business tomorrow should not be news, but it is.And after 24 hours of brinksmanship, deal-making and parliamentary hijinks,last night, the U.S. Senate passed a bill to fund the federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year.The bill now heads to the president's desk for his signature.Joining us is our national political correspondent Mara Liasson to talk more about this. Hey, Mara.Good morning.So what happened last night? Was this expected in the end?Well, the last minute hijinks weren't expected.What happened was the effort to fund the government for another year met some pretty strong headwinds from conservatives in the Senate.The last-minute monkey wrench was Ted Cruz's futile effort to stop President Obama's immigration actions,and that caused senators who thought they were getting the weekend off to scramble back to Washington.But Cruz's effort backfiredand Harry Reid, the outgoing majority leader, the Democratic leader, was able to take advantage the openingthat Cruz's gambit created by scheduling votes on a couple dozen presidential nomineeswho will now probably be confirmed this coming week.And that's probably a lot more nominees than Democrats would've gotten through the Senate otherwise.OK, so let's talk about Ted Cruz. A lot of this was pivoting around him.What was his strategy? What was he looking for?Well, he wanted a vote on the president's immigration actions.He got one, but he only got 22 votes.That's about half the current Republican ranks in the Senate, but he lost.His colleagues are hopping mad at him. They think what he did was ineffective, grandstanding.
