Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images At the start of the weekend, avoiding a partial government shutdown on January 30 still seemed like a possibility. Half of the 12 appropriations bills had already cleared both houses of Congress. The other six spending bills were pending in the Senate; after a freestanding vote on Department of Homeland Security funding scraped through the House , they’d been combined into a single package. If seven or eight Senate Democrats voted for the package (depending on what