After 38 days of stalemate, the Senate is finally turning to its tactic of last resort to solve the government shutdown: a working weekend.
For the first time since the start of the nearly six-week shutdown, Majority Leader John Thune is keeping the chamber in session past Friday in a bid to keep the pressure on Democrats — at the urging of President Donald Trump and some fellow Republicans who want senators to stay in D.C. until there’s an agreement.
But with party leaders shadow boxing over competing funding and health care proposals, and bipartisan rank-and-talks moving slowly, there’s plenty of skepticism anything can get done until at least early next week.
“What we have here is an intergalactic freak show,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said after a closed-door GOP conference meeting.
Asked what senators could get done in the rare weekend session, Kennedy predicted, “Nothing. … We’re going to be here for a long time.”
The Senate will come into session on Saturday at noon but has no votes scheduled for the time being. GOP leaders aren’t yet holding another vote on the House-passed stopgap bill that Democrats have already rejected 14 times, in hopes that bipartisan talks among rank-and-file senators can build enough support to reopen the government.
“We’re here, and we’ll see if something comes together we can vote on,” Thune said Friday night, adding it “remains to be seen.”
With senators essentially left to wait and see, some are expected to leave town for home-state engagements. But many said they were happy to stay given their growing frustration with how the shutdown has dragged on — and how the real-world consequences continue to pile up.
“My adage is, put them in a barn and don’t let them out until they come up with a solution,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said Friday.
Members of the bipartisan group at the center of the government funding talks are expected to stay in Washington through the weekend to keep negotiating. One person granted anonymity to disclose private discussions said that as of Friday night the bipartisan talks had picked back up. Thune said he is also speaking to Democrats “regularly” about the path forward.
On a separate track, the top members of the House and Senate Appropriations committees are trying to finalize a three-bill package that would provide full-year funding for food aid, veterans programs and other agencies and programs.
But even as the bipartisan conversations continue, there are doubts they will produce a deal that could eventually get the necessary eight Democrats to break ranks. Trump, for one, continues to press Republicans to ditch the 60-vote filibuster rule and reopen the government on party lines.
The bipartisan Senate group is talking about attaching the three full-year bills to stopgap funding legislation for the rest of the government. They’re also discussing possibly rehiring federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown, as well as reining in the president’s ability to unilaterally claw back some congressionally approved funding. Neither of the latter two is settled or even guaranteed to make it into legislative text.
Senators appear nowhere close to resolving Democrats’ key concern: guaranteeing an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year. Republicans are offering a Senate vote on the matter after the government reopens, but with no guarantee of House or presidential action.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said it was “insane” that top congressional leaders and Trump have refused to speak directly for weeks to make a deal.
“I appreciate when our colleagues get together and talk. I’ve been part of a lot of rank and file negotiations. But that doesn’t seem to be a path right now,” he said.
“They refuse to engage,” Murphy added later. “It’s killing the country.”
Murphy is part of a group of Senate progressives rankling Democratic negotiators, who view him and other senators as privately pushing for the caucus to dig in on health care without a realistic path toward a deal.
But the desire for health care concessions among Democrats runs deep, even as Republicans insist the government has to be reopened before any negotiations on the issue take place.
“I need something on health care,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said leaving the Capitol Friday evening.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer offered what he cast as a compromise proposal Friday, saying Democrats would provide the votes to reopen the government if Republicans agreed to attach a one-year extension of the ACA subsidies. Thune quickly dismissed it as a “nonstarter,” as did virtually his entire conference.
Republicans have held private discussions about the ACA subsidies, both with Democrats and with each other. Emerging from a closed-door conference meeting Friday, several GOP senators vowed the party would produce its own health care proposal once the government reopens. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), however, said it would take a while because they still need to get Senate Republicans, House Republicans and the ultimate wild card, Trump, on the same page.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) took to the Senate floor Friday evening to float a new proposal to address the expiring subsidies — creating new savings accounts to help people buy insurance. Cassidy has been involved behind the scenes in bipartisan discussions on health care, but those talks were put on ice weeks ago as it became clear Republicans would not cut a deal with the government closed.
Some Republicans, and even some Democrats, ended the day hoping that Schumer’s offer — and its quick rejection — could herald a thaw in the frozen talks. On-the-fence Democrats, the thinking goes, will now realize that bringing the long-running rank-and-file negotiations to fruition is the only path out of the morass.
“I think the Republicans made it very clear today that they were not going to support Senator Schumer’s offer,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said Friday night. “We need to find another path forward.”
