Ten days into the shutdown, Republicans are dug in as ever and refusing to budge on any Democratic health care demands.
And the House still won’t come back to work.
Speaker Mike Johnson was visibly angry in multiple press conferences on Friday, and despite some pressure from members of his conference to bring the House back, he made clear it’s not happening.
“They’re making a mockery of this, and it is outrageous to us,” he said of Democrats, joined at the lectern by Senate Majority Leader John Thune. “You’ve got two very even-tempered guys here. We don’t get upset a lot. We don’t get our feathers ruffled, okay, but this is so outrageous.”
A GOP-led continuing resolution has already passed the House, but failed in the Senate for the seventh time on Thursday, with only three members of the Senate Democratic Caucus voting in favor. The Senate is now slated to return on Tuesday, meaning the shutdown will go until at least its 13th day. And for the fourth week in a row, the House canceled votes with Johnson insisting there was nothing more for them to do.
“We have already had those votes. We’ve done that,” Johnson said on Friday.
On a conference call on Thursday, some Republican members — most notably Reps. Jay Obernolte and Stephanie Bice — pushed to have Johnson bring members back. But most of the House Republican Conference appears to back the speaker’s decision to remain in recess until the Senate passes their bill.
In doing so, they give Thune the ability to say he has to keep bringing up the House CR. If the Senate agreed to any changed version of the bill, the House would have to re-vote on the legislation.
The moment has given Johnson the rare support of the disparate factions of the conference.
Rep. Andy Harris, chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told reporters Friday the group was “aligned with the speaker.”
Rep. David Valadao, a California moderate, also emphasized his support for the speaker, telling NOTUS that he believes “most Republicans are firmly behind” Johnson.
“Republicans flipped to the right side with a clean CR and Dems switched to the partisan side with unrealistic expectations,” he added.
Thune has shown no sign of relinquishing repeated votes on the same continuing resolution, either. He’s already filed cloture to tee up an eighth vote on the bill next week. Even the looming threat of the military missing a paycheck next week isn’t moving him.
When asked about the potential of standalone military pay legislation in the Senate at a press conference on Friday, Thune picked up a printed copy of the stopgap bill and waved it in the air, saying they’ve “got a military pay bill right here.”
“This pays the military,” he added. And all they have to do is pick it up at the desk. Give us five votes.”
Democrats remain steadfast in their own strategy — insisting they will continue to deny Republicans the necessary votes until both sides come to an agreement on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that are soon set to expire.
“I’m not going to negotiate in public,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said this week. “Step 1 to any possible good, serious solution is they sit down and talk to us in a serious way and address the problem.”
But those talks aren’t happening. And even while they’re not in D.C. doing normal business, GOP lawmakers and their fellow Republicans are set to inflict significant pain on Democrats. On the press call with the Freedom Caucus, Johnson announced that he has been working with the administration on another set of rescissions — where Trump can claw back congressionally approved funds. An earlier round of rescissions this year invoked fury from congressional Democrats.
“There’ll be more of that, we expect, in the days ahead,” Johnson told reporters.
Pointing to previous rescissions, Democrats argue the White House and congressional Republicans aren’t working in good faith when it comes to government funding, and anything they pass could just be axed by the White House.
Johnson rebuffed that assessment at a later meeting with reporters.
“We sent over this clean document,” he told reporters Friday afternoon. “We didn’t load it up with any partisan priorities, because we’re not playing games here. We wanted to keep the lights on so we can continue the appropriations process to spend the taxpayers’ money more responsibly.”
There does appear to be one thing Republican leadership might budge on: the end date of the continuing resolution.
The current bill text has funding set to expire on Nov. 21 — a date that is rapidly nearing as the shutdown continues. There’s growing concern that even if the government shutdown is resolved imminently, another shutdown could be quickly on the horizon.
Thune on Friday said pushing the date to later in December “could be an option.”
Still, while refusing to move, he projected hope.
“I think this is going to happen organically, with enough reasonable Senate Democrats who care enough about doing the right thing for their country and not what’s in the best interest of their left-wing political base to come forward and help us find a solution,” Thune said. “And those conversations continue.”