Congress Is Sprinting Toward a Shutdown After Senate Democrats Block Republican Funding Bill

Senate Democrats blocked the House-passed continuing resolution, which would have extended government funding levels through Nov. 21.

The 44-48 vote was expected, as Democrats pledged to block any funding resolution that did not include significant increases to health care spending and an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year. Two Republicans, Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul, voted with Democrats against the CR and eight Republicans did not vote.

Murkowski told reporters she voted ‘no’ because she wants a more substantive CR, which she said should include the three appropriations bills already passed in the Senate, the ACA subsidy extensions and funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, “at least for the short term.”

“Both of these were messaging bills,” Murkowski said. “They both did what everybody predicted was going to happen, which was they were going to go down. And so I wanted to project my clear message, and that does not include just a short-term CR.”

Paul’s ‘no’ vote came down to the deficit, he told NOTUS.

“When you add up how much comes in and how much we spend, it works out to about a $2 trillion deficit,” Paul said. “If you keep spending at the same level, the deficit next year is gonna be about $2.1 trillion. I’m against that large of a deficit.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is already poised to pull the CR up for another vote on Sept. 29 or 30, after a weeklong recess. Government funding runs out on Sept. 30.

“The choice is pretty clear,” Thune told reporters before the vote Friday. “It’s going to be funding the government through a clean, short-term continuing resolution or a government shutdown, and really, that’s the choice the Democrats have.”

House Republicans passed the resolution earlier on Friday, and a notice sent out to members said they would not be in session on Sept. 29 or Sept. 30 — essentially daring Senate Democrats to vote it down again. Thune told NOTUS he would bring the bill back up at some point, but “not today.”

The finger-pointing on who is to blame for the potential shutdown has already begun.

“If Chuck Schumer intends to shut the government down, I don’t see an easy route out of that,” Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday. “There’s going to be a lot of pain, and a lot of people will suffer from that unnecessarily.”

Democrats had offered their own CR alternative that extends expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies, beefs up security funding for members even more and puts up guardrails against the president requesting funding rescissions, among other things. That CR was a nonstarter for Republicans from the beginning, and it failed 47-45 in the Senate on Friday.

“They put out the most partisan piece of legislation you possibly could, to attach to a continuing resolution to fund the government for seven weeks,” Thune said Friday, referring to Democrats’ CR. “I mean, it’s kind of mind-boggling, actually.”

Rep. Tom Cole, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said a government shutdown would be “silly beyond belief.”

“It will not work in the end. It pushes people into corners,” Cole told reporters. “It’s a lot easier to shut down the government than it is to reopen it. It’s usually a humiliating experience for somebody.”

The short-term “clean” CR passed the House on Friday in a 217-212 vote: Two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie and Victoria Spartz, voted against on the bill, while one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden, voted for it.

Republicans said it would have extended government funding at current levels and prevented the looming government shutdown. The seven-week funding extension — which President Donald Trump had been pushing for — was supposed to give lawmakers more time to get appropriations bills through Congress.

“It’s just interesting that all of a sudden, year after year of saying how irresponsible it is to shut down the government, now [Democrats] are doing it,” Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, a cardinal on the House Appropriations Committee, told NOTUS just after the House resolution passed.

“Assuming that Schumer doesn’t want to shut down the government, it puts us in a position to finish appropriation bills,” Díaz-Balart added.

Democrats argued Republicans did not negotiate with them on this continuing resolution and released their own CR text in retaliation.

“The Republicans control the House, the Senate, the White House. We have been saying we’re ready to work with you on this, but this shutdown is on them,” Democratic Rep. Morgan McGarvey told reporters after the vote.

Democratic leadership in the House and Senate argued for the past week that they would stay unified in opposing this continuing resolution unless these demands were met. In March, 10 Senate Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, voted with Republicans on a CR after it passed the House, keeping the government open.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters Thursday that she wasn’t expecting a repeat of what happened in March.

“The Senate is with us,” DeLauro said. “We’re in lockstep.”

House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark told NOTUS she was on the same page.

“The Senate is going to stand strong with the American people and protect their health care,” Clark said.

As for what happens next between the Senate and the House, Cole said: “We’re done until they act on it, or send us something back that’s different, which they certainly could do.”

“I actually consider that healthy if we’re in a ping-pong,” Cole added. “To send us back something, both parties would have had to agree on it over there. So you’ve got some bipartisanship going and you’ve got a negotiation. And honestly, it moves away from a partisan fight to an institutional fight, House versus Senate.”