Republicans are ratcheting up pressure on Democrats on multiple fronts as the government shutdown enters a third workweek, hoping the hardball moves can finally force a reckoning as U.S. troops face a first-ever missed paycheck.

The GOP fear is that if the military pay deadline passes without action, there will be little to stop the shutdown from continuing for several more weeks at least. Some Republicans have privately warned the White House that taking unilateral action to pay servicemembers would deprive the party of a key lever to make Democrats feel overwhelming consequences for their refusal to act on a House-passed spending bill.

As Washington inched closer to the Wednesday pay date, Republicans on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue sprang into action: At the White House, budget director Russ Vought announced “substantial” layoffs Friday, finally making good on two weeks of threats.

On Capitol Hill, Senate Republicans said they would no longer allow Democrats to keep calling up their own stopgap spending bill funding the government through the end of October, forcing votes only on the GOP-led alternative. Speaker Mike Johnson is continuing to keep the House out of session this week, and he argues Democrats will bear the consequences of federal workers and troops missing pay.

“It’s a compelling reason to open the damn government,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), adding that “the troop deadline is the issue — if anything becomes an inflection point, it’s that.”

The GOP effort to force Democrats to heel comes as talks between the top four congressional leaders remain virtually nonexistent. And there’s no sign that rank-and-file Senate Democrats — just five of whom could quickly end the shutdown — are ready to flip ahead of another scheduled vote on the House-passed stopgap Tuesday night.

Rather than military pay, Democrats are looking at another day they believe will be the ultimate pressure point: the Nov. 1 launch of open enrollment for Affordable Care Act insurance plans. The party has sought to make the pending expiration of premium tax credits a central issue in the standoff, demanding Republicans cut a deal to extend them.

“The closer to Nov. 1, a lot of these elected officials are going to start hearing from their constituents,” said Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) when asked what he thinks will break the impasse.

The fear that the shutdown is pitting the unstoppable force of Democratic anger at President Donald Trump versus the immovable object of GOP resolve not to flinch has not yet generated any substantive bipartisan negotiations.

While Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries believe the only way out of the shutdown is for their GOP counterparts and Trump to talk to them, Republicans are making it clear that they don’t see the point right now and are counting on rank-and-file Democrats to pressure their own party brass.

“I think Leader Schumer has checked out,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Friday, adding that Republicans were looking for “bold, courageous Democrats with a backbone.”

In addition to the military pay deadline, lawmakers are keeping a close eye on federal aviation as another potential area that could force Congress into a detente. Thune mentioned the shutdown’s impacts on air travel, saying it was one way senators “might start to feel that a little bit personally.” Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, separately noted last week how air traffic controllers were a driving factor in the last shutdown.

But if the Trump administration thought Friday’s firings of several thousand federal workers would break the impasse, it instead appears to have only stiffened Hill Democrats’ spines to keep the shutdown going.

“We will not be threatened and intimidated by the likes of Russ Vought,” purple-district Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) told reporters Friday.

Jeffries is calling House Democrats back to Washington for a Tuesday evening caucus meeting, and Democratic lawmakers are expected to take part in more public appearances this week even as the House stays out of session. He and Schumer have largely managed to keep their caucuses unified on the demand for a bipartisan negotiation — even though there are already clear signs of fissures between the two Democratic leaders over what would be an acceptable end to the shutdown.

“The American people want it, they are seeing how devastating this is, and they are putting a lot of pressure on their Republican congressmen and senators,” Schumer said when asked why he believes Republicans will change their minds on health care, insisting that GOP senators were “feeling the heat.”

Democrats are also trying to drive a wedge between GOP leaders and the White House. Schumer has pointed to Johnson, who is wary of extending the insurance subsidies, as the real roadblock. And Durbin, asked about Thune, noted he had known and worked with the genial South Dakotan for years but “he is at the mercy of a president who is mercurial.”

Republican leaders, however, have shown no signs they will back down from their view that any deal on extending the expiring tax credits can’t be forged while the government is closed down. Instead, they are trying to peel off another five Senate Democrats by dangling an offer to talk once the shutdown is over.

“There are some Democrats who I think are reasonable enough to know that this is not a sustainable position for them,” Thune said.

The bipartisan talks among the Senate rank-and-file are ongoing but have so far failed to bear fruit. Republican leaders floated an offer to potentially hold a vote on extending the subsidies, but Democrats involved in the talks said the details were too fuzzy to agree. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is separately floating a “six-point plan” to Democrats, which would involve a similar commitment on health care plus moving full-year government funding bills.

Even though the group hasn’t yet come up with a deal, aides believe the rapid launching of trial balloons late last week was a good sign. Eventually, they reckon, one of them will take flight and get Congress out of the shutdown.

But the other risk, Republicans are starting to warn, is that the standoff could go on for so long they might need to extend the window for reaching a broader deal on federal spending and the insurance subsidies.

The House-approved bill expires on Nov. 21, just before Thanksgiving. Now some in the GOP are floating dates just before Christmas, and top party leaders are discussing that possibility. Democrats, meanwhile, want a shorter window for action — before the Nov. 1 open enrollment date.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma Republican whom White House officials have tapped to coordinate informal talks with Democrats, said he has floated the later, pre-Christmas deadline in hopes of breaking something loose.

“You start with A, B, C, and you probably end up at D,” Mullin said. “And I think right now we’re probably somewhere around B.”

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) on Sunday characterized a string of U.S. strikes on Venezuelan boats in international waters as “illegal killings,” saying the White House has not yet shared their legal justification for the attacks with congressional lawmakers.

“They are illegal killings because the notion that the United States — and this is what the administration says is their justification — is involved in an armed conflict with any drug dealers, any Venezuelan drug dealers, is ludicrous,” Himes told host Margaret Brennan in an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “It wouldn’t stand up in a single court of law.”

The U.S. has carried out at least four strikes on Venezuelan boats in the past month, which the Trump administration has characterized as a campaign to target “narcoterrorists” that they say are responsible for smuggling drugs into the country. Lawmakers and former security officials have continued to sound alarm at the strikes, saying it blurs the line between crime and war.

Himes — the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee — said aside from a White House memo informing lawmakers about the strikes, members of Congress had not been briefed on a list of outstanding questions — like who was aboard the boats, how they were identified as a threat and what the extent of U.S. intelligence was before carrying out the strikes.

Trump sent Congress a formal notification in compliance with the War Powers Resolution of 1973 two days after the first strike in September, saying the boat “was assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”

“Congress is being told nothing on this,” he said. “And that’s OK, apparently, with the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate. It’s not OK with me.”

Himes continued, calling the White House’s legal justifications “laughable,” and saying the administration designating an entity as a terrorist does not automatically give it the authority to carry out a lethal strike.

“My Republican friends are saying, ‘But these are terrible people doing terrible things,'” he said. “OK, I don’t disagree with you on that, but are we now in the business of killing people who are doing bad things without authority?”

Himes signed onto a letter with other Democratic House leaders in September decrying the first strike as a “dangerous expansion and abuse of presidential authority.”

“The lack of transparency and information sharing with Congress, which has the constitutional responsibility to declare war and authorize or limit the use of force, poses an even greater threat to our democratic system of government,” they wrote.

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.