Republican and Democratic congressional leaders left a meeting with President Donald Trump with no deal to avert a government shutdown as the deadline fast approaches.
Leaders met with Trump on Monday for roughly an hour to negotiate a path forward to avert a partial government shutdown, but it appeared neither side was willing to budge from their position.
Vice President JD Vance said after the meeting, ‘I think we’re headed into a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing. I hope they change their mind.’
‘If you look at the original they did with this negotiation, it was a $1.5 trillion spending package, basically saying the American people want to give massive amounts of money, hundreds of billions of dollars to illegal aliens for their health care, while Americans are struggling to pay their health care bills,’ Vance said. ‘That was their initial foray into this negotiation. We thought it was absurd.’
Democrats, however, have pushed back on assertions that they’re looking to salvage healthcare for anyone but the American people.
‘There was a frank and direct discussion with the President of the United States and Republican leaders. But significant and meaningful differences remain,’ Jeffries said. ‘Democrats are fighting to protect the health care of the American people, and we are not going to support a partisan Republican spending bill that continues to gut the health care of every day America, period.’
Congress has until midnight Oct. 1 to pass a short-term funding extension, or continuing resolution (CR), to avert a partial government shutdown. The House already passed a funding extension, but the bill was blocked in the Senate earlier this month.
Republicans and the White House want to move forward with their ‘clean,’ short-term funding extension until Nov. 21, while Democrats have offered a counter-proposal that includes a permanent extension of expiring Obamacare tax credits and other wishlist items that are a bridge too far for the GOP.
Vance appeared alongside Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought in a show of Republican unity after the meeting, but made clear both sides are still far apart.
Thune, holding up a copy of the funding extension, panned Jeffries and Schumer’s accusation that the bill was partisan in nature.
Congressional Republicans argue that the House GOP’s is everything that Democrats pushed when they controlled the Senate: a ‘clean,’ short-term extension to Nov. 21 without partisan policy riders or spending, save for millions in new spending for increased security for lawmakers.
‘To me, this is purely a hostage-taking exercise on the part of the Democrats,’ Thune said. ‘We are willing to sit down and work with them on some of the issues they want to talk about, whether it’s an extension of premium tax credits, with reforms, we’re happy to have that conversation. But as of right now, this is a hijacking.’
Neither Schumer nor Jeffries took questions after their remarks, but appeared slightly more optimistic than their GOP counterparts after the meeting concluded.
‘I think for the first time, the president heard our objections and heard why we needed a bipartisan bill,’ Schumer said. ‘Their bill has not one iota of Democratic input. That is never how we’ve done this before.’
Vance said he was ‘highly skeptical’ that it was Trump’s first time hearing the issue and said there was a bipartisan path forward on healthcare – but panned Democrats’ push to include an extension of COVID-19 pandemic-era Affordable Care Act (ACA) extensions in the bill.
‘We want to work across the aisle to make sure that people have access to good healthcare,’ he said, but added, ‘We are not going to let Democrats shut down the government and take a hostage unless we give them everything that they want. That’s not how the people’s government has ever worked.’
The meeting in the Oval Office comes after Trump canceled a previously scheduled confab last week with just Schumer and Jeffries. At the time, the president railed against their demands on his social media platform Truth Social and contended that congressional Democrats were pushing ‘radical Left policies that nobody voted for’ in their counter-CR.
Democrats’ demands center on an extension to expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies, though their counter-proposal also included language to repeal the healthcare section of the GOP’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ and a clawback of canceled NPR and PBS funding.
Senate Republicans have argued that Democrats’ desires are unserious, and Thune has publicly said that Republicans would be willing to have discussions on the ACA subsidies, which are set to sunset at the end of this year, after the government is funded.
Schumer insisted Democrats needed it addressed immediately, however, in a press conference back on Capitol Hill after the meeting.
‘We think when they say later, they mean never. We have to do it now, first because of the timing issue and second, because now is the time we can get it done,’ he said.
The White House is also leveraging the threat of mass firings should the government shut down that go beyond the standard furloughing of nonessential employees. Still, Schumer and Senate Democrats have not buckled.
The Senate is expected to vote again on the bill on Tuesday.