The Senate rejected dueling bills to fund the government for a seventh time Thursday, as the federal shutdown appears all but guaranteed to slide into a third week.
Senators will vote again on the two stopgap measures as soon as Friday. But with no votes flipping since last week, there’s no sign that they are close to breaking the impasse.
Instead, Republicans believe they were handed a new political gift: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s suggestion that the shutdown is getting better politically “every day” for Democrats.
“He says every day gets better for us. … He’s not talking about the American people,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told reporters shortly before Thursday’s votes.
Barrasso and Senate Majority Leader John Thune both spoke on the floor Thursday morning with signs that featured Schumer’s remarks, which were made during an interview with Punchbowl News. Several other GOP senators and the White House weighed in on the comments Thursday.
“No matter what Chuck Schumer thinks, Americans struggling is not good, and the Democrats must stop inflicting this pain on them and reopen the government now,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
Schumer didn’t directly address the remarks during a speech from the Senate floor on Thursday, instead sticking to Democrats’ main message: that Republicans, as the party in power, could break the stalemate by coming to the negotiating table on government funding and health care.
But he appeared to indirectly clarify them, adding that “each day our case to fix health care and end the shutdown gets better and better, stronger and stronger.”
“Donald Trump, Speaker [Mike] Johnson and Republicans in Congress are nowhere to be found,” he said, adding that the three GOP leaders “need to sit down with Democrats and have a serious negotiation.”
Top Republicans, however, have repeatedly warned that they will not negotiate on the substance of soon-to-expire Affordable Care Act tax credits while the government is shut down.
Barrasso, the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters on Thursday that GOP leaders would be willing to give Democrats a vote on some priorities, including on the Affordable Care Act, once the government reopens.
“I think there are discussions about that,” Barrasso said. “We need to open the government and then we can have all the discussions and votes and talks and all of those things.”
Thune, asked recently about the possibility of guaranteeing an ACA vote, didn’t dismiss it, but said he didn’t believe Democrats would take that as an off ramp.
“They want a guaranteed result,” Thune said on Monday.
There are bipartisan discussions going on about what would happen after the government reopens, including on the larger full-year funding bills and health care. But they have not yet borne fruit.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters on Thursday she has been in “close contact” with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), “who is very constructive and is trying to find a path forward.”
But, she said, “we need to open up the government today.”
Diana Nerozzi contributed to this report.
