Congress

Jon Ossoff should be feeling shutdown heat. He’s not acting like it.

Published

9 months ago

October 12, 2025

On paper, Jon Ossoff has plenty of reasons to break party ranks as the government shutdown drags into a third week: The 38-year-old Georgian is the most vulnerable Senate Democrat up for re-election next year and his home state has more than 81,000 federal workers at risk for furloughs and firings

In reality, Ossoff is sticking closely to his party’s strategy of trying to reframe the shutdown fight as a battle over health care — and has emerged as an object lesson in the limits of Republican efforts to focus pressure on the Democrats’ soft spots.

Part of that calculus is that it is much riskier to alienate your own party’s base than to break ranks in hopes of appealing to swing voters. The bigger issue, fellow senators say, is that there is little belief today’s shutdown will matter much at all when voters start heading to polls a year from now.

“It just doesn’t stick,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D) said in an interview. “I think every year the attention span of the American people gets shorter and shorter.”

“Nobody is going to be paying attention to the shutdown next November,” added Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who pointed to how Republicans gained seats in the midterms after the 2013 shutdown fight they instigated.

Even though Ossoff represents a state that voted for President Donald Trump last year and his re-election race is ranked as a toss-up by leading campaign prognosticators, he has positioned himself in lockstep with his party’s leadership. He opposed the GOP-led stopgap funding bill in March, embraced calls to impeach Trump earlier this year and has sparred with Trump nominees in Senate hearings.

It’s a break from the tack-to-the-center playbook used by swing-state Democrats for decades. Ossoff as of last month had voted with Trump just 8 percent of the time, according to tracking from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Two other purple-state Democrats — Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania — have voted with Republicans to pass a House-approved bill that would end the shutdown.

Asked about the standoff this week, Ossoff hewed closely to his party’s main message on expiring health insurance subsidies and foisted blame on House Republicans for leaving town amid the standoff.

What Americans are trying to get “their heads around,” he told reporters, “is, with health insurance premiums set to double for more than 20 million Americans and the federal government shut down, why the U.S. House of Representatives is shut down this week.”

That line of argument is in keeping with his party’s main bet: that midterm voters won’t remember the shutdown so much as they remember that Democrats were fighting on behalf of Americans’ health care benefits. More than 20 million use the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire, including an estimated 1.4 million Georgians.

Ossoff and other Georgia Democrats have seized on health care as a focus for their political messaging in the state. During a recent event in Georgia, Ossoff raised concerns about the impact the GOP’s new domestic policy law enacted in July will have on rural hospitals, which stand to be harmed by Medicaid cuts that are only partially offset by a new fund for their benefit.

Even if some of Ossoff’s Republican colleagues are skeptical he will face political consequences for lining up behind the rest of his party amid the shutdown, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm is hammering him over the decision, including circulating a list of federal services that have been paused in the state and running digital ads attacking him since the shutdown began.

“Jon Ossoff is knowingly hurting Georgia’s small businesses and ripping away critical government services from Georgia veterans, farmers, and families all because he wants to give free healthcare to illegal aliens and appease his far-left supporters in California,” NRSC spokesperson Nick Puglia said in a statement.

Republicans have long viewed Ossoff as a prime target for the 2026 midterm map. He defeated Georgia Sen. David Perdue in a down-to-the-wire upset that wasn’t settled until Jan. 6, 2021 — hours before the Capitol riot.

The 2021 Georgia race — which also saw Democrat Raphael Warnock defeat incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler — remains infamous in GOP circles as an opportunity lost due to self-inflicted wounds. Ahead of the election, Trump cast serious doubts on mail-in voting in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, which Republican operatives believe cost them victory in both races.

Now Republicans are contending with a crowded primary field eager to take Ossoff on that has yet to see a clear frontrunner emerge. They are betting that once Trump makes an endorsement, GOP voters will rally and make Ossoff a one-term senator. At least one of the candidates, Rep. Mike Collins, has launched digital ads attacking Ossoff over the shutdown.

Ossoff, however, has spent years preparing to do battle in what has long been eyed as a hotly contested race. His team has billed him as “MAGA’s #1 target” in fundraising appeals as he drums up support among committed Democratic voters, who will be crucial for him.

His campaign announced last week he had raised $12 million in the latest quarter, padding a formidable war chest that now stands at $21 million. Both parties are likely to pour in tens of millions of dollars in outside spending; the 2020 Georgia Senate races were the most expensive of the cycle.

Democrats also believe Ossoff’s health-care-focused strategy in the shutdown fight is getting backup from an unlikely in-state wingwoman: GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The MAGA stalwart emerged this month as a vocal advocate for her party needing to come up with a plan to deal with the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies. Democrats have relished Greene’s comments as a sign that even a figure once on the fringes of the Republican Party is acknowledging that insurance premiums will spike without congressional action.

“Why would Marjorie Taylor Greene go out so strong on that issue? She’s in Georgia, and I think Georgia was getting some of the first notices,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “I think Georgians are seeing at the front end how bad it’s going to be.”

Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.

Congress

Senate Ethics dismisses allegations against Ruben Gallego

Published

50 minutes ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed allegations of misconduct levied against Sen. Ruben Gallego, who stood accused by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of “campaign finance violations and inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature.”

The charges came following the resignation of the Arizona Democrat’s longtime friend, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who was forced to step down amid accusations of serious sexual misconduct. Luna, a Florida Republican, sought to implicate Gallego by claiming in an interview on CBS that a woman would come forward about an “incident that occurred between the two of them at the same time and the event was sexual in nature allegedly.”

But in a letter to Gallego sent Monday — which he shared in a public news release — the notoriously inactive Ethics Committee cited Gallego’s “prompt contact with the Committee following media reports of the allegations and appreciated your full cooperation with the Committee throughout the investigation.”

Gallego has maintained he was unaware of the allegations against Swalwell and said in a statement he was a victim of “right-wing conspiracies peddled by far-right activists like Anna Paulina Luna, the White House, and their allies.”

He continued, “I look forward to an apology from Rep. Luna for weaponizing the ethics process while refusing to investigate historic corruption that’s making life harder for families.”

Luna, in a post on X, defended her referral to the Senate Ethics Committee.

“The good news about DC is everyone talks, and eventually the reporters come forward with your texts,” Luna wrote on social media. “Do yourself a favor and keep raising for your legal defense fund. Once a creep always a creep, and you’re gonna need it.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s state. She represents Florida.

Congress

Rubio, Witkoff to brief Congress on Iran

Published

4 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Top deputies of President Donald Trump will brief Congress on the Iran peace talks in a Monday conference call — the first time administration officials have addressed a broad group of lawmakers since Trump signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Tehran earlier this month.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, will lead the briefing for all House and Senate members at 4 p.m., according to seven people granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting.

Republicans and Democrats have called for more transparency about the 14-point agreement inked on June 18, which initiated a cease-fire between the two countries. Since then, the U.S. and Iran have continued to engage in hostilities.

Congress

Capitol agenda: Red, white and GOP hard-liner blues

Published

7 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Republicans finally cleared a runway this week to finish some of their top legislative priorities before the July 4 recess.

That is, unless a small band of hard-liners trip up those plans at takeoff.

Speaker Mike Johnson is hoping to move quickly to pass fiscal 2027 appropriations legislation, the annual defense policy bill and a kids online safety bill that has been years in the making. The movement comes after President Donald Trump instructed GOP hard-liners to stop holding up a procedural vote amid a protest from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and others that the Senate hadn’t passed Trump’s election security bill.

But Luna and other hard-liners are still threatening to tank the procedural vote that could delay the defense policy bill and other measures until they get concessions on the SAVE America Act, amid other demands.

Johnson, for example, had also promised hard-liners a vote before July 4 on a sweeping GOP immigration bill introduced in the prior Congress as H.R. 2, which is highly unlikely to happen.

Johnson for his part has said the House will “pass the SAVE America Act again” by folding parts of it into a third party-line reconciliation bill. But the slimmed-down version he’d need to pursue in order to meet strict Senate rules for the budget process is already being panned by hard-liners as insufficient.

That reconciliation bill is also already delayed. House Republicans aren’t on track to meet their goal of advancing its framework before the July 4 recess as members on the Budget panel balked over how to pay for the legislation in a closed-door meeting last week.

“Time is of the essence, given how many legislative days we have,” House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie, who is sponsoring the kids online safety legislation, said in an interview last week. “If we lose a week, that would be important.”

Meanwhile, Democratic leadership is grappling with their own heated internal divisions this week. Members are split over supporting the adoption of an amendment to a fiscal 2027 spending bill from Rep. Thomas Massie that would end Israel aid and cut the overall foreign military aid program by $3.3 billion.

Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro did not instruct her colleagues on how to vote during a rare Sunday evening caucus call, two sources granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting tell Mia and Riley. Leaders did, however, criticize the amendment as poorly written.

One other item this week that could split members of each party: House lawmakers are also slated to vote on a rewritten war powers resolution from Rep. Rashida Tlaib to reign in Trump administration military actions in Lebanon. Leadership worked with Tlaib to come up with new language last month that is expected to garner more Dem support, but the resolution is still expected to fail without GOP votes.

What else we’re watching:

— SENATE GOP GETS ANTSY ABOUT NOMINATIONS: Some Republican senators are unsettled by Trump’s apparent lack of urgency in filling vacant posts, even as GOP control of the chamber beyond the midterms is increasingly in doubt. There are more than two dozen federal court vacancies. Labor secretary, FDA commissioner and scores of other open positions do not have nominees, and a senior White House official said Trump is in no rush to fill them. “We’re running short on time,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a member of Senate HELP, which oversees health, labor and other issues.

—RICK SCOTT SAYS HE’S JUST TRYING TO HELP: Fresh off his controversial Trump invite to a Senate GOP lunch last week, Sen. Rick Scott told Blue Light News in an interview he’s trying to make a mark — not trying to challenge Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Scott insists that neither his invitation to the president nor a letter he circulated afterward outlining how the Senate GOP should be preparing for the midterms should be seen as a prelude to a leadership challenge. The Florida Republican said he’s perfectly happy running the conference’s conservative Steering Committee and predicted Thune would easily secure another term as leader. What has become eminently clear in recent weeks is that Scott — after a long career in business, two terms as governor and nearly eight years as senator — just isn’t a back-bench kind of guy.

Meredith Lee Hill, Riley Rogerson, Alex Gangitano, Jordain Carney and Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.