Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., wants to jam Senate Democrats with the GOP's short-term funding extension, but so far they aren't ready to play ball.
Republicans and Democrats in the upper chamber blocked dueling continuing resolutions (CRs) from both parties last week and have now left Washington, D.C., until Sept. 29, effectively giving lawmakers in the upper chamber only two working days before the midnight deadline on Sept. 30.
Both sides are at an impasse. Senate Republicans argue that the "clean" extension, which would last until Nov. 21 and lacks any partisan policy riders, is everything Democrats dreamed of when they controlled the upper chamber.
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Senate Democrats led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., however, argue that they want a seat at the negotiating table and are adamant that expiring Obamacare premium subsidies must be dealt with now, rather than at the end of the year.
"They're trying to use what they think is leverage to get a bunch of stuff done," Thune said. "It's never going to happen. I mean, can you imagine anything in that bill that they sent that we voted down today, passing in the Republican House of Representatives? Absolutely not. It's just not serious."
Democrats' proposal included a permanent extension to the expiring Obamacare subsidies, clawbacks of canceled funding for NPR and PBS, and it would have repealed the healthcare provisions in President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" - policy that would reverse the nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts while also getting rid of the $50 billion rural hospital fund.
"They're not being serious," Thune said. "This is just a cold-blooded partisan political attempt to try and score political points with a left-wing base."
Though he has not taken the option off the table, it's unlikely that Thune would cut this recess short. Instead, he wants to use the impending deadline to back Senate Democrats into a corner. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., played into that strategy, too, when he announced that the House would not return until after the funding deadline.
Thune is ready to bring the same CR passed by House Republicans last week to the floor.
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Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., railed against the likelihood that lawmakers wouldn't return to Capitol Hill until the deadline was directly on them.
"The Republicans want to shut down," he said. "A) they refuse to negotiate, and B) they're sending us home for the week before the government shuts down. So you know this, this seems like a planned shutdown. As far as I can tell, there's zero effort, zero effort by Republicans to try to solve this problem."
Schumer and Democrats have pinned the blame on Trump and argue that his insistence that Thune only needs Republican votes was a sign that Democrats should be cut out of the process. Thune will need Democratic votes to advance through the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate.
The top Senate Democrat hoped Thune and Republicans would "now see that the only way to avoid a shutdown is negotiate with Democrats."
"We're saying clearly, let's sit down. Let's figure this out," Schumer said. "But Republicans have now left town with no sign they want to avoid a shutdown in a week. They left town. Donald Trump is the shutdown president and Senate Republicans are following him over the cliff."
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Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., also sent a letter on Saturday to Trump demanding a meeting, where the pair charged that "Republicans would bear the responsibility" of a partial shutdown.
"As a result, it is now your obligation to meet with us directly to reach an agreement to keep the government open and address the Republican healthcare crisis," they wrote.
Trump said on Saturday that he would "love to meet with them, but I don't think it's going to have any impact."
A day before, he didn't appear optimistic that a shutdown could be averted.
"I think we could very well end up with a closed country for a period of time," Trump said.
Thune may have defections within his own ranks to contend with, too. Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, voted against the GOP's bill. Only Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., crossed the aisle to support it.
Paul's vote against the bill wasn't a surprise. However, Murkowski, who is an appropriator, contended that she wanted a better bill on the floor than the one presented by Republicans and charged that the back-to-back failures of both bills was a "messaging exercise."
"I want to project a message of something that can actually get us through this impasse," she said. "And so my message is a short-term CR that also addresses three past appropriations bills that we've already done. We should include those. We should include a short-term fix of the premium tax credits."
