Senate Democrats for a 10th time blocked Republicans’ attempts to reopen the government and have ensured that the shutdown goes into next week.
That’s because after one final vote series later on Thursday, lawmakers will leave Washington, D.C., for another long weekend after just three short days on the Hill.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats are ready to flinch in their deeply entrenched positions, and talks between both sides, though largely informal exercises, have begun to fade.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., is determined to continue on the same course of action to keep bringing the House-passed continuing resolution (CR), which would reopen the government until Nov. 21, up for a vote again and again.
Though some in the GOP are mulling a new end date for the CR, that would require the House, which has been out of session for nearly a month, to come back and pass a new one.
While Thune and Republicans are adamant that their plan is the only pathway to ending the shutdown, now on Day 16, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the Senate Democratic caucus still want to hammer out a deal on expiring Obamacare subsidies — and they want President Donald Trump to get directly involved in negotiations.
‘We’re willing to have, as I said, conversations about all the other issues that they want to talk about,’ Thune said. ‘But that can’t happen while they are holding the federal government and all these federal employees and our troops and our air traffic controllers and our TSA agents and our border Patrol officials hostage. Open up the government.’
‘Every day that this goes on, the problems are compounded for federal workers and for ordinary Americans,’ he continued. ‘Chuck Schumer may think that every day gets better for them politically, but I can tell you that is not the experience of the American people.’
When asked if he would compromise on the Democrats’ demands as the shutdown dragged on, Schumer dodged and countered that he wouldn’t negotiate in the public eye.
‘The bottom line is [Republicans] won’t even negotiate with us,’ Schumer said. ‘So that’s a premature question. But of course, I’m not going to negotiate in public. We need to address the crisis that is afflicted, and that’s the right word, the American people.’
However, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., said that Republicans weren’t working on a subsidy proposal to show Democrats, and he noted that talks between the parties were ‘not really’ happening anymore.
When asked if it was possible to get an extension of the credits before the Nov. 1 open enrollment date, he said, ‘I don’t think there’s a way to do that.’
‘And I think if you don’t have it done by Christmas, it becomes a political issue,’ Mullin said. ‘But you could maybe push it to January, to February, if you wanted to, but we get bumped up against, you know, everybody’s primaries, from the Democrat primaries and Republican primaries, and it becomes a political issue, because, unfortunately, healthcare is political.’
Republicans are also trying to reignite the appropriations process in the Senate as the shutdown continues on. Thune teed up a procedural vote later Thursday on the Senate’s defense spending bill, which, among other things, would fund paychecks for the military.
Whether Democrats support the spending bill after spending months demanding a bipartisan government funding process remains an open question — many argued after their closed-door meeting on Wednesday that they didn’t know exactly what Republicans were going to put on the floor and considered a vote on it moot.
As with most of the past 10 attempts to send the House-passed CR to Trump’s desk, the same trio of Democratic caucus members, Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Angus King, I-Maine, voted with Senate Republicans.
Fetterman, who has consistently voted with the GOP every time, echoed his counterparts across the aisle and said that any outside issues aside from reopening the government could be dealt with after the lights were turned back on in Washington.
‘It was wrong to shut it down in March,’ he said. ‘I’m in the same position. It’s not going to change. Everything else we’re talking about, open up the government first, and then we can figure out the rest.’