Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer laid out a new Democratic counterproposal for ending the government shutdown: attaching a one-year extension of soon-to-expire Affordable Care Act subsidies to a spending stopgap that would reopen agencies.
Schumer outlined the proposal during a floor speech Friday that was heavily attended by other Democratic senators in a show of caucus unity.
“We would like to offer a simple proposal that would reopen the government and extend the ACA premium tax credits simultaneously,” Schumer said.
Schumer proposed a “clean” one-year extension to the tax credits that expire on Dec. 31 — meaning they would not include new restrictions on eligibility that many Republicans have sought. He also proposed creating a bipartisan committee to negotiate a longer-term solution for the subsidies and other health care reforms, to begin its work after the government reopens.
Senate Republicans have warned repeatedly that the government has to be reopened before Democrats get any vote on the ACA subsidies. But Democrats have balked so far at those terms as they pressure President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans to cut a deal now to address the expected spike in Obamacare premiums.
“This is a reasonable offer that reopens the government, deals with health care affordability and begins a process of negotiating reforms to the ACA tax credits for the future,” Schumer said. “Now the ball is in the Republicans’ court. We need Republicans to just say, ‘Yes.”
Key Senate Republicans immediately ruled it out, however, with Majority Leader John Thune calling it a “nonstarter.”
“The Obamacare extension is the negotiation,” he said.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) posted on X that it would unduly benefit health insurance companies to blindly extend the subsidies: “Another year of insane profits at the expense of consumers and American taxpayers,” he wrote.
Schumer’s counteroffer came after Democrats met privately for hours Thursday to try to find a path forward that would unify the caucus. It’s a shift from the start of the shutdown, when Democrats included a permanent extension of the Obamacare subsidies in an alternative to the GOP-led continuing resolution that passed the House.
Shortly before Schumer’s speech, a group of roughly a dozen members of the Senate Democratic Caucus — including the No. 2 leader, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois — met in a Capitol basement office. The group included senators who have been negotiating with Republicans about a path out of the shutdown, as well as other Democratic senators viewed as potential swing votes.
A person familiar with the conversation, granted anonymity to describe the private discussion, said that “tone and approach” of the senators in the meeting “doesn’t reflect what you see on the floor.”
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