Senate Democrats signaled Thursday that they have enough votes to block a short-term spending bill to keep the government open, as the White House expressed frustration with the Republican-led Congress for “being unable to do its job.”
At least nine members of the Senate Democratic Caucus who supported the last short-term spending bill in December said they will oppose the latest patch, according to multiple congressional aides.
They are Maggie Hassan (N.H.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Tim Kaine (Va.), Angus King (I-Maine), Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Tom Udall (N.M.) and Mark R. Warner (Va.).
The House planned to vote Thursday night, and the Senate could act shortly thereafter.
White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah offered an upbeat prediction earlier Thursday that the government would remain open, despite growing signs on Capitol Hill that GOP leaders did not have the votes for a short-term spending bill.
“A minimal function of Congress is to fund the government,” Shah told reporters aboard Air Force One. “That is a very basic and fundamental duty.”
The short-term spending bill would keep the government open through Feb. 16 while extending the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for six years and rolling back several taxes in the Affordable Care Act. It does not include a solution for “dreamers,” the undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, as Democrats have demanded.
Reflecting the election-year stakes, aides to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told senior staffers that he is intent on muscling the bill through the upper chamber and putting pressure on Democrats to vote for it, according to a person familiar with the meeting.
The message at the meeting was: “Let’s bring the House bill over and have a quick vote and make the Democrats up in 2018 figure out what they want to do,” the person said.
McConnell’s prime targets in his goal to increase his majority are the 10 Democrats from states that voted for President Trump in 2016.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said
"members understand why on earth we wouldn't want to have a government
shutdown," and is confident they will pass a bill.
Meadows said he spoke to Trump during a meeting of the Freedom Caucus, but that nothing had changed at that point.
Speaking for Democrats, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) signaled the gravity of the situation by speaking in the present tense about a shutdown as if one was already happening.
“It’s really almost like amateur hour,” she told reporters at her weekly news briefing.
Even if the House manages to approve the short-term spending bill, the measure’s chances of passage in the Senate are slim.
A growing number of lawmakers said they opposed the deal — not over immigration, but because they are tired of passing stopgap measures — and demanded that negotiations continue on a longer-term spending bill.
“We do not support perpetuating the current budgetary dysfunction that is hurting our country and our Commonwealth,” Kaine and Warner said in a joint statement. “The Republican leadership has to get serious about finding a budget deal and quit relying on short-term patches.
Republican Sens. Mike Rounds (S.D.), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) also said they would vote no.
The growing opposition led some senators to discuss the possibility of a new approach: passing one- or two-day extensions of government funding to avoid a shutdown while lawmakers continue to negotiate.
“I’ll vote for one more short-term, but that’s it,” Graham said.
But Republican leaders did not immediately embrace the idea, and it was unclear how it would work for the House, which is scheduled to be out of session next week.
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.), leaving a meeting with other deputy leaders, rejected the idea that an immigration deal could be concluded by Friday at midnight. “No, no,” he told reporters.
If the government closes and its employees are furloughed, it will be the first time under unified party control of Congress and the White House.
The Trump administration is drawing up plans to keep national parks and monuments open despite a possible shutdown as a way to blunt public anger, and while the military would not cease to operate, troops would not be paid unless Congress specifically authorizes it.
The last shutdown, in 2013, did not end for 16 days as Republicans tried unsuccessfully to force changes to the Affordable Care Act.
This time, GOP lawmakers are forcing Democrats into the politically uncomfortable position of choosing between funding CHIP and their effort to win legal protections for dreamers. Republicans are already preparing political attacks on Democrats who vote no, party aides said.
Despite this, all but a few House Democrats said they would not support the bill without an immigration or budget deal.
“If we can’t agree, your party has the majority in the House and the Senate to pass your own funding resolution. But that will be a bill we cannot support,” 171 of 193 House Democrats wrote in a letter to Trump.
The president fired back at Democrats during a trip to Coraopolis, Pa., arguing they’re pushing for a shutdown to distract voters from the GOP’s tax cuts. “That is not a good subject for them, the tax cuts,” Trump said.
GOP lawmakers had spent the morning trying to make sense of several early-morning tweets by Trump that seemed to contradict Republicans’ legislative strategy.
In a back-and-forth reminiscent of last week, when Trump tweeted criticism of an intelligence bill that his administration had endorsed the day before, the president appeared to call for the separation of a long-term extension of CHIP from a short-term spending bill to keep the government open through mid-February.
While Republicans like Ryan suggested that the president was endorsing the GOP’s approach, others found the tweets inexplicable and unhelpful ahead of a possible election-year shutdown.
“We don’t have a reliable partner at the White House to negotiate with,” Graham said Thursday morning. “This has turned into an s-show for no good reason.”
“We barely know who to negotiate with,” he said, complaining about Trump’s tweets. “[Republicans] point at each other and nothing gets done.”
Posts
