The government is all but guaranteed to shut down after Senate Democrats blocked a continuing resolution on Tuesday to fund the government at current levels through November.
In a 55-45 vote, the Senate failed to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to advance the CR, hours before the government funding expires at midnight. The Senate will not vote again ahead of the deadline, meaning a shut down is guaranteed.
Republicans and Democrats have been playing the blame game over a shutdown for weeks. This is the second time the Senate has voted on the House-passed bill. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the only Democrat to support the bill last week, but this time he was joined by Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada and Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with Democrats. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted ‘no’ on the bill previously and switched to a ‘yes’ on Tuesday, while Republican Sen. Rand Paul voted ‘no’ again.
Republicans were quick to spotlight the additional Democratic defections. Sen. John Barrasso said the “cracks” in the caucus were already beginning to show as they got the additional Democratic “yeses” on board.
“Democrats may have chosen to shut down the government tonight, but we can reopen it tomorrow. All it takes is a handful of Democrats to join Republicans to pass the clean, non-partisan funding bill,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said at a press conference after the legislation failed to meet the vote threshold.
Meanwhile, Democrats said Republicans left them out of the negotiation process when crafting the CR, which mostly keeps government funding at the same level for seven weeks and adds funds for security. Democrats had been pushing for an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies in the must-pass bill.
“Leader Thune did not come once to me and say, ‘Is this bill acceptable? What do you want in the bill?’” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday in a floor speech. “So they call it clean, we call it extremely partisan.”
Many federal workers will be furloughed, and all nonessential agency work will halt. Federal employees will not be paid (they do get back pay when the shutdown is over). Congress and the president will continue getting paid. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has threatened mass layoffs during a shutdown. Some agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, will be exempt from those “reductions in force” during the shutdown, NOTUS reported Monday. Others that perform crucial jobs, like the Transportation Security Administration and FBI, will continue operating.
Retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said Monday that he’s sympathetic to concerns of federal workers caught in the shutdown crossfire. He said he hopes any shutdown layoff plan would be more “thought out” than the administration’s previous rounds.
“Most federal employees just want to show up, do their job and do as good as they can do, and I hate to see them kind of put into this mix right now, when the real problem is us doing our job,” Tillis said.
Rep. Tom Cole, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, predicted that the shutdown would be short but detrimental.
“It’s going to be a bad thing. It’s going to cost the economy money. It’s going to create enormous uncertainty amongst the workforces that are impacted, both public and private,” Cole said. “There’s no good that comes in a government shutdown, but the damage always exceeds whatever gain.”
He added that there’s not much the House can do until the chambers negotiate and the Senate sends something back.
On Monday, President Donald Trump met with Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Thune and Johnson at the White House to discuss a potential deal.
Both parties emerged without much progress. Schumer and Jeffries said an ACA extension and guardrails to prevent the president from rolling back appropriated funds in the future were must-have additions for them on any funding bill. Republicans accused Democrats of being unreasonable.
“Republicans have made it pretty clear that they want to shut down,” Sen. Chris Murphy saidTuesday. “They’re not even here to negotiate. President Trump didn’t seem to be seriously negotiating yesterday. So you know, until Republicans get serious, things don’t look good.”
Schumer had been promising for weeks that Democrats would not back the CR, which the House passed along party lines last week. Senate Democrats blocked the funding patch before both chambers left for a weeklong recess.
Schumer and Jeffries continued to insist during that time that nearly their entire caucus would vote ‘no’ on the CR unless Republicans gave them something on health care. They also voiced concern about Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal workforce and roll back federal spending on his own thus far in his term.
Appropriations leaders from both parties warned of what a shutdown could mean for the executive branch’s influence.
“The best thing to do to avoid OMB action is just to keep the government open. They can’t do anything if we keep the government funded. Obviously, they play a different role if we go into a shutdown,” Cole said Monday. “The executive branch has an enormous amount of power during a shutdown.”
Republican Rep. Morgan Griffith said Tuesday that Democrats were handing Trump the opportunity to slash the federal government.
“The president’s going to be pulling out that pen,” Griffith said. “He can move pretty quickly with that pen and say, ‘This program’s not funded or authorized. Gone. This program’s not funded or authorized. Gone. And these people are not essential. See you later.’”
“In the previous shutdowns, the president didn’t have the stated goal of shrinking the federal government, and this is the way to shrink the federal government,” Griffith added. “Why would you give him that kind of authority when you don’t agree with him? I happen to agree with him on those things, but I still think it’s my job as a member of Congress to do that, and not the president’s job to do a lot of these things. And so I’m not comfortable with it because it’s going to be fast. It’s going to be programs maybe that I like.”
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the ranking Democrat of the House Appropriations Committee, was much more critical of OMB on Tuesday morning.
“The president knows nothing about appropriations. Russ Vought does, and he is systematically trying to dismantle public health, education, the ability of the federal government to deliver services to the American people,” DeLauro said. “That is what he is about, and he wants to aggrandize the power to make the decisions.”
In March, Schumer and eight other Democrats voted with Republicans to pass a CR, saying that a shutdown would give Trump more power to unilaterally slash the federal government. The move roiled House Democrats, as well as advocacy groups and others in the party.
This time, despite threats from OMB to do just that, Schumer and his caucus largely held the line on their opposition to the funding bill as it stands now.
Thune said Tuesday morning that the Senate will observe the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur on Thursday, but he intends to keep members working during shutdown.He said more votes are expected this week on nominations and government funding attempts.
The House is scheduled to return Oct. 7, and Johnson said he would not bring them back early, meaning the shutdown will likely last at least a week.