WASHINGTON — The Senate will reconvene for some rare weekend work to continue negotiations on reopening the government, although it’s not yet clear if lawmakers will make enough progress to vote on ending the shutdown before next week.
The Senate adjourned late Friday evening after failing to pass a bill to pay federal workers, a proposal that received overwhelming Democratic opposition over concerns it would be unevenly applied by the Trump administration.
Lawmakers did not vote on a package to reopen the government and advance some full-year spending bills despite initial plans to do so — sending congressional leaders back to the drawing board on how to end the party-line stalemate.
The Senate will return to session on Saturday at noon for debate, although it’s not clear if votes will be scheduled that day.
A path toward reopening the government seemed to be on the horizon when senators met earlier this week, but that progress slowly began to unravel after Democrats notched major electoral wins on Tuesday night. Those victories were proof that Democrats’ message is working, they argued, meaning the party must continue pressing their GOP colleagues for deeper concessions.
Senate Democrats unveiled a counterproposal on Friday afternoon, throwing an unexpected curveball to Republican negotiators who expected a vote on their package as early as Friday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., laid out the framework on the Senate floor, demanding Republicans include a one-year extension of the enhanced Obamacare subsidies to the spending package to reopen the government. R
epublicans have previously offered a separate vote on the subsidies but have rejected including it in the larger package over arguments it is unrelated to regular government spending.
“It’s a nonstarter, it just is,” Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, said on Friday, telling the Deseret News he believes progress backslid in recent days. “It doesn’t feel like there’s any negotiations. We came to the negotiations asking for nothing. So how do you negotiate? This is Backwards Day. Everybody changed the rules.”
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, similarly rejected the proposal, accusing Democrats of seeking help from Republicans in the majority to fix a health care system they created to use as political leverage.
“What do they want to use that leverage for? They want to use it so as to paper over the failures, the abject failures of Obamacare,” Lee said in a floor vote on Friday. “This law that has succeeded in doing exactly one thing: enriching large health insurance companies while making all Americans poorer.”
Republicans held a closed-door meeting to discuss the counterproposal on Friday afternoon, with several emerging calling the idea “absolutely absurd,” “a joke,” and “unserious.”
Bipartisan talks continued throughout the day on Friday and they are expected to drag through the weekend. Negotiators are closing in on a new date to extend government spending, with that timeline expected to last until the end of January, according to Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are considering a proposal of their own to counter Democrats’ demands on health care, although details of such a framework are not yet finalized. Several GOP lawmakers have different ideas, Mullin said, but it could take weeks before something is drafted.
“We’re not going to continue for a year to load up insurance companies with taxpayer dollars to get an inferior outcome,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who will help lead those talks, said on Friday. “We’re not going to continue (Obamacare as-is) for one day with my vote, much less one year.”
Senate Democrats, for their part, consider their offer to be somewhat reasonable — if not just a new starting point for bipartisan negotiations.
“I thought we made a pretty fair offer,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who has been pushing party leadership to demand deeper concessions, told reporters on Friday. “There’s a lot of people in our party who want to do a multiyear extension. Obviously, there’s a lot of people who think we shouldn’t be asking just for ACA subsidies. So we made a really simple, really scaled-down offer that could get the government up and operating and would be good for them politically.”
The backslide has left several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle disillusioned, especially as the shutdown enters its seventh week with no clear path forward. Some are even warning the worst is yet to come.
“We’re gonna be in a shutdown for a while, guys. I mean, it’s just very simple. Everybody can rant and rave and cuss and discuss, but we’re gonna be in a shutdown,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told reporters. “We’re back to square one.”