Bipartisan talks on reopening the government began to materialize less than a day into the shutdown, with Republicans and Democrats trying to find a middle ground on expiring Obamacare tax credits.
The federal government entered its first full day of a shutdown on Wednesday, and so far neither side of the aisle is willing to buckle as the hours ticked by.
Still, in the middle of Senate Republicans’ third attempt to pass the House GOP’s short-term funding extension, a group of nearly a dozen senators huddled on the floor in the first public display of negotiations so far.
‘There are glimmers of hope, and I think they’re bipartisan,’ said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who was in the huddle.
The conversations on the floor came as Republicans demanded that Democrats yield and provide the votes to reopen the government, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., doubled down on his position that Democrats wouldn’t budge without ‘serious’ movement on Obamacare premium subsidies.
‘Donald Trump and Republicans have barreled us into a shutdown because they refuse to protect Americans’ healthcare,’ Schumer said. ‘It’s clear that the way out of this shutdown is to sit down and negotiate with Democrats to address the looming healthcare crisis that faces tens of millions of American families.’
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., appears willing to slowly chip away at Senate Democrats through a de facto war of attrition and plans to bring House Republicans’ bill to the floor for a vote again and again.
The Senate will be out on Thursday to observe Yom Kippur but is expected to return Friday and possibly vote into the weekend on the continuing resolution (CR) that would reopen the government until Nov. 21 to give lawmakers more time to finish work on the dozen spending bills needed to fund the government.
Thune told Fox News Digital that he expected to talk to Schumer ‘in the next day or two.’
‘He’s indicated that he’s interested in doing that,’ Thune said. ‘I’m not sure what we’ll achieve by that, but I think there are, I mean, things seem to be moving on their side. We just keep telling them to ‘give us — open up the government, and we’ll get on with regular business.’’
Thune and Senate Republicans have argued that Senate Democrats’ rejection of the GOP’s CR is hypocritical, given that when former President Joe Biden was in office, Schumer and his caucus routinely voted for ‘clean’ extensions — like the GOP’s current proposal.
But the issue for Democrats was multifaceted.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., was among the many lawmakers holding a confab on the Senate floor, and while he didn’t divulge full details of the private talks, he said a major issue for him was about ensuring that a ‘deal is a deal.’
‘Anything we agree to, because it’s not a clean CR if the president will tear it up tomorrow,’ he said. ‘In the past, we voted for clean CRs, but the president has shown that he’ll take the money back.’
Among the options tossed around in the huddle were a 10-day funding extension once floated by Schumer, which he quickly shot down earlier this week, or passing the Republican plan to actually give lawmakers time to negotiate a solution to the expiring tax credits.
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said there were no high-level discussions quite yet, but that any path forward had to be ‘enforceable.’
‘The bottom line here is that I sense real concern among my Republican colleagues about what happens to the people they represent if we go off the cliff on the Affordable Care Act,’ he said, referring to Obamacare.
And Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who helped facilitate the conversation, said it’d be ‘great’ if lawmakers were able to get something figured out before the Nov. 21 deadline in the GOP’s bill, but that he and other Republicans were still pushing Democrats to support their legislation.
‘It’s not like there’s anything that they should be objecting to with regard to what’s in the existing bill,’ he said. ‘This is their hostage, and we’re just telling them, ‘Look, we’ve got support on the other side to fix the issues that you have a concern about, but it’s going to take time to negotiate those through.”