On one side is the minority party, using what little leverage it has — a looming government funding deadline — to push for priorities it can’t enact otherwise. On the other is the majority, insisting a short-term funding punt is no place for negotiation.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because just such a scenario has played out dozens of times on Capitol Hill over the past decade and a half — usually with Republicans pushing for policy concessions and Democrats insisting on a “clean” stopgap.
Not this time. The roles have been reversed between the two parties as Congress barrels toward a government shutdown on Oct. 1 with no obvious off-ramp in sight.
It’s Republicans who are pushing a “clean” seven-week continuing resolution, which they say will buy time for more negotiations on full-year spending bills and possibly an extension of expiring health insurance subsidies. Democrats, meanwhile, wrote an alternative four-week punt that tacks on a laundry list of other demands, including a permanent extension of the insurance subsidies.
Conservative Republicans who have balked at past stopgaps have signed on to their party’s strategy, as have Democrats who have traditionally been most loath to flirt with shutdowns — such as the Washington-area members who represent federal workers who stand to be furloughed.
“My brain’s falling out of my head,” Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) said in an interview. ”When you talk about the Freedom Caucus talking about passing a CR and the Democrats saying, ‘I’m going to shut down the government.’ I’ve never seen anything so weird in my life.”
There are myriad reasons for the current moment’s Bizarro World politics, but the biggest is a transformation of incentives. Where Republicans have spent most of the past 15 years heeding the wishes of a party base spoiling for a fight, damn the consequences, it’s now Democrats in that position. The GOP, meanwhile, is in lockstep behind President Donald Trump, who is determined to corner his opposition.
The current situation, in fact, is a nearly precise inversion of the standoff seen in the fall of 2013, when conservative Republicans led by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas sparked a shutdown over a demand to reverse Democrats’ signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act. They backed down after 17 days.
“It did not work for them,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) recalled last week as he reflected on how Democrats are now seeking a reversal of parts of the GOP’s own signature legislation — health care provisions in the domestic policy bill the party passed in July. Democrats also want to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of this year.
“They tied something unrelated to spending, Obamacare, and shut down the government,” Cole added. “That was the wrong thing to do then. … You are doing the same thing now. It’s nothing else.”
Democrats at the time insisted that any funding bill stay free of policy provisions. Then-Majority Leader Harry Reid at the time cast the choice for the GOP as “whether to pass the Senate’s clean CR or force a Republican government shutdown.”
They said much the same when they had majorities under President Joe Biden. According to statistics that have been circulated by Senate Republicans this month, Congress complied by passing 13 clean funding stopgaps in that four-year stretch.
Pressed on the turning of the tables, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Friday insisted there was an articulable distinction.
“What’s different? They were taking something away,” he told reporters. “We’re trying to restore something that they took away. It’s a world of difference when you’re trying to do some good for people rather than doing negative stuff for people.”
It’s not just Democrats who have had to confront a tactical 180 in the current fight. Facing grumbling from the right flank of his conference, Speaker Mike Johnson vowed last year to never pass another continuing resolution to fund the government. On Friday, he muscled through the second GOP-backed stopgap of 2025.
One House Republican described a closed-door conference meeting last week like being in “the Twilight Zone,” as several hard-liners who once opposed continuing resolutions as preludes to bloated, opaque omnibus spending bills voiced support for a short-term punt.
Among those who spoke up was Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), a former House Freedom Caucus chair, and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a co-founder of the hard-right group who used to push for shutdowns but now urged his colleagues to “send Chuck Schumer a clean CR.”
The key difference this time is Trump, who publicly backed both GOP-led stopgaps this year. It’s also helped that his budget director, Russell Vought, has delighted conservatives by seeking to formally rescind or simply not spend money Congress has previously appropriated. Democrats are now seeking a prohibition on those moves in the current standoff.
“There’s nothing clean about the administration undermining Congress,” Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) said.
Last week, Democrats were mainly fuming about Trump’s comments that GOP leaders shouldn’t “even bother dealing with” them. On Friday, he predicted “it could very well end up with a closed country for a period of time.” A day later, after top Democratic leaders demanded a meeting, he said he would “love to meet with them, but I don’t think it’s going to have any impact.”
“Donald Trump told them, ‘Don’t talk to the Democrats,’ and so they didn’t,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said. “He wanted a clean CR, and he got it on the House side. I’m not sure what he’ll get in the Senate.”
Trump’s comments fueled partisan tensions that spilled into plain sight Friday with Schumer and Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Republican leader, bickering on the Senate floor.
Barrasso accused Schumer of trying to take funding “hostage,” blocking Schumer’s attempt to claim speaking time to ask a question.
“The reason we are having a shutdown now is you and your leadership refused to talk to Democrats or have any input,” Schumer said in response. “Never a shutdown when we were in the leadership.”
Top Republican leaders are supremely confident that Democrats are holding a losing hand — based in part on the outcomes of past shutdown fights their own party instigated.
“You learn from past experience,” Thune said, responding to a question about the 2013 shutdown. “When you’re the ones who are trying to have a bunch of new stuff, generally, I think you’re the ones who end up getting blamed when there’s a shutdown.”
But Democrats so far have continued to dig in — including those members who have tended to serve as an internal bulwark against brinkmanship. Typically members with constituencies heavy on federal workers have been wary of shutdowns, but even they are dead set on opposing Republicans’ recent Medicaid cuts and securing the insurance subsidy extension.
“Everything they’re doing is designed to protect their dismantling of Medicaid and the health care system, and we made a very emphatic statement that we are going to stand strong,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said.
GOP leaders believe if Senate Democrats don’t fold right away, they’ll get an earful from constituents when they’re back home this week for the Rosh Hashanah break.
They’re eyeing members such as Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, who has been adamant in public that Republicans will bear the cost of a shutdown. Republicans think Warner, who is seeking reelection next year, is likely to change his tune. “I don’t know if they’ll want to stick it out then,” said one House Republican granted anonymity to speak frankly about party strategy.
But Warner said Friday he was ready to fight, citing “17 million Americans going without health insurance, cancer rates going up dramatically, [the] country visibly sicker with cuts to research.”
“I know the president may not want to acknowledge checks and balances,” Warner said. But “he can’t do this with Republican-only votes.”
Hailey Fuchs, Jordain Carney, Katherine Tully-McManus and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
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