Washington is waking up to its first government shutdown in nearly seven years. How many more days that will be the case, no one knows.
With President Donald Trump and congressional leaders not actively negotiating, there’s no sign the shutdown will be over before the end of the day. And with Congress dormant for Thursday’s Yom Kippur holiday, that all but ensures it will go until at least Friday if not far beyond.
Instead, Congress is poised to enact a reprise performance Wednesday: The Senate will vote on, and likely reject, dueling stopgap proposals for a third time, while House Democrats hold another closed-door meeting and House Republicans do not plan to return to the Capitol until next week at the earliest.
Leaders of both parties are digging in for a lengthy battle — ramping up the blame game and putting the onus on their political opponents to blink if they are going to quickly find a way to reopen shuttered agencies.
“It’s in their court to solve it — it’s their shutdown,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said of Republicans Tuesday.
“We are not going to be held hostage,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said. “There isn’t anything here to negotiate.”
Fueling the stalemate are perverse political incentives. Both parties believe the other will face a bigger voter backlash over the shutdown. Democrats are banking on Republicans shouldering the blame because they control the levers of power in Washington.
Under pressure from their base to show they are fighting Trump, they spent months honing a strategy to make health care, including extending insurance subsidies set to lapse at the end of the year, the centerpiece of their message going into this shutdown and next year’s midterm elections.
But Republicans are warning that if Democrats are banking on them quickly caving, they will be waiting — and agencies will be hamstrung — for quite some time. GOP leaders are set to hold a morning news conference outside the Capitol Wednesday to hammer Democrats and reiterate that there is one path out of the shutdown: a House-passed seven-week funding punt.
Asked if he was ruling out any talks on Democrats’ health care demands, Thune said, “The negotiation happens when the government opens.”
The trench warfare has lawmakers openly questioning whether they can find a way out of the showdown anytime soon. The atmosphere in the Capitol has darkened from just 48 hours ago when senators and aides were holding out faint hope that an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Democratic leaders would help shake loose some progress toward a deal.
Instead, the meeting produced no outward progress, and Trump has since poisoned the well by posting inflammatory deepfake videos depicting Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said he hoped a shutdown would be “short” as he cast doubt on Schumer’s ability to hold Senate Democrats together indefinitely.
“I don’t believe that 47 Democratic senators are going to want to walk the plank,” he said.
Republicans got a boost Tuesday night when Sens. Angus King (I-Maine) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) joined Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) to vote for the GOP-led House bill. Republicans are hoping they will be able to peel off five more Democrats as the shutdown continues, with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) among the senators they’re watching closely.
King critiqued the push from some corners of the Democratic base to use the shutdown battle to fight Trump, saying in a video explaining his vote that the “irony, the paradox, is by shutting the government, we’re actually giving Donald Trump more power.”
Thune left the door open for talks with Schumer after Tuesday’s votes, noting that the New York Democrat knows how to get a hold of him. But any conversations would happen against a backdrop of mounting political pressure.
Republicans will force a vote again Wednesday on their funding bill and plan to keep calling up the bill almost daily — including through this coming weekend — to try to squeeze the opposition. Speaker Mike Johnson and fellow House GOP leaders, meanwhile, are still mulling how to extract maximum pain from Democrats, including debating whether they’ll return next week as previously advised, according to two people granted anonymity to describe private deliberations.
Top Republicans, the people said, are wary of bringing the House back without a legislative fix to vote on and are also discussing what votes they could potentially force Democrats to take to inflict more political pain.
Senate Democrats have also been privately debating what steps they can take during a shutdown to try to keep pressure on Republicans and potentially create an off-ramp, according to two other people granted anonymity to disclose internal discussions.
Schumer remained unbowed after Tuesday night’s vote, saying “Republicans have failed to get enough votes to avoid a shutdown. They’ve got to sit down and negotiate with Democrats.”
But pressed on whether he could guarantee his caucus would stick together against the GOP bill, Schumer was less than definite: “The bottom line is, our guarantee is to the American people that we are going to fight as hard as we can for their health care,” he said.
While leadership-level relations stay chilly, rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats have engaged in quiet talks about possible paths out of the shutdown. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said it might be time to bring back the “talking stick,” an object passed around in bipartisan meetings of senators who helped end a brief shutdown in early 2018.
“I still have it,” a smiling Collins said.
Cortez Masto told reporters after her vote on Tuesday night that she’s “open to working with my colleagues across the aisle to extend the credits if that helps open the government again.”
Part of the discussions include potential reassurances on the Affordable Care Act credits that are key for Democrats. Other Republican senators are floating trial balloon olive branches to their Democratic colleagues.
Those talks, so far, haven’t reached critical mass. And some Republicans who support extending the credits worry the shutdown will make an eventual deal more complicated.
“This will put that on ice for a while,” said Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the Republicans who favors an extension. “I think the length of the shutdown will affect that. … Once you go off the cliff it’s hard to come back.”
Meredith Lee Hill and Calen Razor contributed to this report.
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