Welcome to the government shutdown. There’s no sign right now anything will change by this weekend.
Congressional leaders are digging in, without any bipartisan meeting on the books for Wednesday. They will, however, host dueling news conferences Wednesday at 10 a.m. before voting again at 11 a.m. on the two opposing continuing resolutions. Don’t expect a different result.
“It’s in their court to solve it. It’s their shutdown,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters. Senate Majority Leader John Thune says “there isn’t anything here to negotiate” and that “the negotiation happens when the government opens.”
Senators are out Thursday for Yom Kippur. They plan to return Friday and Saturday to continue voting, if not high-level negotiations.
Behind the scenes, rank-and-file lawmakers are starting to talk among themselves about how to get out of the shutdown. Sen. Susan Collins suggested bringing back the infamous “talking stick” — the object passed around in bipartisan meetings of senators who helped end a brief shutdown in early 2018.
GOP leaders are hoping to slowly peel off five more Democrats as the shutdown continues. Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and independent Sen. Angus King of Maine voted in favor of the GOP-led CR on Tuesday night.
Meanwhile, expect the White House to put the squeeze on Democrats. OMB Director Russell Vought directed federal agencies to begin implementing their shutdown plans Tuesday night after previously calling on agencies to use the opportunity to permanently reduce their workforces.
“A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” President Donald Trump said in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want. They’d be Democrat things.”
See also: How the shutdown will impact key agencies and services
What else we’re watching:
— Crypto hearing: Coinbase’s Vice President of Tax Lawrence Zlatkin will argue before Senate Finance on Wednesday morning that tax rules for cryptocurrencies “are stuck in the past,” according to Zlatkin’s testimony obtained exclusively by POLITICO. Zlatkin will recommend the committee make an array of updates to the tax code when it comes to digital asset users.
— Trump noms pulled: The White House on Tuesday reversed course and withdrew a slate of nominations, including for E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Brian Quintenz to chair the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The administration has already started exploring alternative candidates, according to four people granted anonymity to discuss the search.
— And Trump noms confirmed: The Senate will vote Wednesday morning on confirming 108 nominations en bloc, including Hung Cao to be undersecretary of the Navy.
Jordain Carney, Nicholas Wu, Benjamin Guggenheim and Calen Razor contributed to this report.
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