Thune May Force Democrats To Vote on Republican Funding Bill for as Long as It Takes After White House Meeting Yields No Results

Preparing for a Groundhog Day scenario on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, the Senate’s majority leader, Senator John Thune, says lawmakers may be taking repeated votes on the Republicans’ short-term funding bill until they can avert a government shutdown due to begin at midnight on Wednesday. Mr. Thune tells The New York Sun that he and other congressional Republicans are standing firm with President Trump, who is asking the Senate to forgo negotiating expiring health care subsidies until it passes a temporary spending bill to fund the government until November 21. The House passed the stopgap bill on September 19.Senate Democrats are trying to leverage support for keeping the government open in exchange for extending temporary Biden-era insurance subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the calendar year. The more rigid stance is a turnaround from the last few months, when Democrats faced backlash from their base for voting in March to fund the government until the September 30 fiscal year end. Mr. Thune, who met with Democrats alongside Speaker Mike Johnson and Mr. Trump at the White House on Tuesday, says that no such bargain will come. Instead, he will use procedural mechanisms to repeatedly bring up the spending bill for back-to-back votes. “There are ways to trigger those votes,” Mr. Thune told the Sun Monday night after returning to the Capitol from the White House. “I mean, at some point, you know, they’re just going to need to keep voting it down,” Mr. Thune continued. “The only thing right now standing between our country and a shutdown is Senate Democrats.”Democrats said they had hoped that if they sat down with Mr. Trump, they could appeal to his desire to make a deal and avoid the shutdown. Mr. Schumer claimed after the meeting that the president was unaware of the expiring health insurance subsidies when they met in the Oval Office on Monday. “He was not aware that the real effect of that starts October 1st, not December 31st,” he said of potential lapses in coverage and spiking premiums. “How do we solve this problem? Well, we told the president he can solve the problem by demanding of the [Republican] legislative leaders … that they simply start off with the [tax credits].”Despite Mr. Trump’s stated desire to find a solution, he held firm that the subsidies issue should be dealt with after the government is funded. “If they want to talk about how to fix American health care policy, let’s do it,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters following the bipartisan meeting. “Let’s work on it together, but let’s do it in the context of an open government that’s providing essential services to the American people. That’s all that we’re proposing to do.”“I think we’re headed to a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing,” Mr. Vance added. Mr. Thune backed up the vice president, saying that Senate Republicans are willing to sit down and talk but not while the minority party is engaged in “hostage-taking.”“We’re willing to sit down and work with them on some of the issues that they want to talk about … but as of right now, this is a hijacking of the American people, and it’s the American people that are gonna pay the price,” Mr. Thune told reporters at the White House. Mr. Schumer said that he made an impassioned plea to the president about the extension of the health insurance subsidies and how millions of Americans would pay “huge increases” if tax credits lapse. “It’s in the president’s hands,” Mr. Schumer declared. “He has to convince the Republican leaders.”If changes are made to the House-passed funding bill that is now in Senate limbo, then the House would need to take it up. However, Mr. Johnson is not expecting to see his colleagues on Capitol Hill this week. With the House out of session until October 7, he would have to call his colleagues back to Washington at the last minute on Tuesday for a vote on Wednesday, or votes will have to wait until next week. In either scenario, the government would be shut down for one day at least.

Thune May Force Democrats To Vote on Republican Funding Bill for as Long as It Takes After White House Meeting Yields No Results

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