Congressional Democrats released bill text Wednesday night for their own stopgap spending proposal as they dig in against a House Republican-backed measure that would fund the government until late November.

The new Democratic proposal links funding the government through Oct. 31 to two of the party’s other priorities: health care assistance and placing limits on President Donald Trump’s ability to unilaterally roll back funds previously approved by Congress.

The Democratic stopgap bill has virtually no chance of passing the Senate — much less getting to Trump’s desk before the end-of-the-month deadline to avert a shutdown. But it allows Democrats to rally behind a plan that will win a broad swath of support among their members in the House and Senate.

“We invite Republican leadership to finally join Democratic leadership at the negotiating table, which they have refused for weeks to do, to prevent a shutdown and begin bipartisan negotiations to keep the government funded,” Congress’ top Democratic appropriators, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Washington Sen. Patty Murray, said in a joint statement.

The Democrats’ bill would extend boosted Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies that will otherwise expire on Dec. 31. It also would reverse cuts to Medicaid and other health programs that Republicans enacted as part of their party-line megabill this summer.

Schumer hasn’t explicitly demanded that an extension of the expiring health care subsidies be attached to the stopgap bill, but Democrats also believe Congress can’t wait until the end of the year because Americans will need to make decisions about health insurance before that time.

The Democratic alternative comes after House Republicans unveiled their own funding proposal to punt the shutdown deadline to Nov. 21, which they want voted on their chamber floor by Friday. That offer also would include $30 million for lawmaker security and another $58 million in security assistance requested by the White House for the Supreme Court and executive branch.

But Democrats have bristled over the GOP proposal because Republican leaders are, so far, not negotiating with them. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries sent two letters to Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker MIke Johnson requesting a meeting but said they had been ignored.

“Democrats do not want a government shutdown. We’ve asked Republican leadership multiple times to meet with us to start negotiating,” Schumer told reporters Tuesday after a closed-door caucus lunch where Democrats discussed offering an alternative proposal.

Thune opened the door Tuesdayto meeting with Schumer. But Democrats largely brushed off his comments, accusing Republicans of bending to Trump after the president said in a Fox News interview late last week that he didn’t need Democratic support. The Senate will need 60 votes to advance the spending deal, which will necessitate help from Democrats.

Despite both Senate leaders now claiming they are willing to meet, as of early Wednesday evening nothing was on the books yet.

Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.

More than three dozen lawmakers are already planning to leave Congress next year. But there’s another impending legislative branch retirement that could have major implications in Washington.

Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who heads the Government Accountability Office, hits the end of his 15-year term Dec. 22 and will be forced to vacate the post that occupies an increasingly crucial — and politically charged — oversight role.

The comptroller general is uniquely empowered to call out the president for breaking the law by withholding federal cash, and Dodaro has done so repeatedly over the past eight months — putting himself at the center of a largely partisan fight over President Donald Trump’s funding moves that has exacerbated tensions between the White House and Capitol Hill.

Now Trump gets to nominate Dodaro’s replacement, and key lawmakers are only just starting to take stock of a paradox: A president who continually tests the bounds of Congress’ spending powers gets to pick the legislative branch’s chief watchdog.

“It sets up a very bad situation,” Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the next Senate Democratic whip and a senior appropriator, said in an interview. “Among the things to be alarmed about, this is a new one.”

The stakes are high: Whoever ends up running GAO once Dodaro’s term ends will be able to bolster, or undermine, Congress’ defenses against Trump in the separation-of-powers battle the president is stoking by terminating, freezing and reallocating hundreds of billions of dollars Congress previously approved.

“When one party controls the Senate, the House and the White House, there’s a tendency to rally around the president and to do what the president wants,” said David Walker, Dodaro’s predecessor and the only living former GAO director. “But somebody’s got to be able to be the independent referee, and to try to do what they think is in the interest of the institution, the Congress and the country. And that’s what the comptroller general is.”

All of this is taking place as Trump administration officials and some congressional Republicans have been trying to downsize and discredit the watchdog. That has included publicly questioning the GAO’s authority and accusing the agency of siding with Democrats in its multiple determinations that the White House unlawfully flouted Congress’ “power of the purse.”

White House budget director Russ Vought said this month that GAO is “a quasi-legislative independent entity … something that shouldn’t exist.”

There have been other slights, too. In the Senate, the GAO told Republicans they could not skirt the filibuster in voting to override California’s pollution standards; Republicans did so anyway. In the House, GOP lawmakers endorsed cutting the agency’s roughly $800 million budget in half for the upcoming fiscal year. And Elon Musk, prior to leaving the Trump administration, attempted to send in a Department of Government Efficiency team to assess the GAO for mass staff reductions.

Meanwhile, the legislative branch writ large has become more broadly vulnerable to the White House’s whims, seen most starkly in Trump’s abrupt firing of the librarian of Congress and the registrar of copyrights.

It’s not yet clear what the Dodaro succession plan will look like; a White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

A seven-member panel of lawmakers is supposed to recommend at least three replacement candidates for Trump to consider. By law, that group is composed of the top four leaders in each chamber, the chairs and ranking members of the key House and Senate oversight committees and the Senate president pro tempore.

However, most congressional leaders have yet to start hunting for qualified contenders, and furthermore seem largely unaware they have any role to play in filling the slot.

“I don’t even know the process,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in a brief interview. “It’s been a while. This hasn’t happened on my watch.”

Two of the would-be commission members had kind words for Dodaro, including Sen. Rand Paul, chair of the Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“I’ve always appreciated him, and I think he’s a straight shooter,” the Kentucky Republican said in an interview.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the panel’s ranking member, said he “would want somebody like Gene, who has been a really solid member.”

On the House side, Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said in an interview he’s looking for the next GAO director to be “an aggressive person that looks for waste, fraud and abuse.”

Comer added, “We want someone that communicates regularly with Congress, so we can kind of have an idea of what they’re doing.”

But Trump could instead ask Republican senators to confirm a new watchdog of his own choosing — or forgo making a nomination altogether.

It would leave a leadership vacuum at the top of the agency that not only monitors whether Congress’ spending directives are followed but is also empowered to examine the effectiveness of federal agencies on behalf of lawmakers.

Further raising the stakes in confirming a new director, lawsuits are pending around the country challenging Trump’s withholding of congressionally approved funding, and a federal appeals court ruled this summer that only the GAO director can sue the administration for violating the decades-old impoundment law — not the groups that were set to receive the funding.

Dodaro has so far chosen not to sue the Trump administration for withholding funding. But when he steps down, he’ll be able to pick an acting GAO director who also would have the power to file a lawsuit if they so choose.

Still, said Molly Reynolds, head of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, “if you get a comptroller general in place who is Trump-friendly, that is going to foreclose that option” of GAO suing the administration.

An acting director also wouldn’t be “in a position to make major transformational changes,” warned Walker, the former GAO director.

When Walker resigned in 2008, he appointed Dodaro acting director, a title that stuck for more than two years because Congress and the president weren’t quick to work through the nomination process. Before that, it also took two years to formally install Walker in the post in 1998.

Walker is now urging congressional leaders to recommend candidates who are willing to challenge executive branch officials regardless of who is president, as he did during his own tenure. A political independent who “leans Republican” and was confirmed by a GOP-led Senate, Walker sued the Republican vice president, Dick Cheney, for failure to provide GAO access to records.

He is also agitating for lawmakers to quickly start the search for potential replacements: “There’s no reason that they shouldn’t be planning now so that they can end up trying to make a timely decision.”

Several Republicans joined all House Democrats in voting to sink a GOP-led measure to formally condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar and remove her from her committees.

The 214-213 vote ended an effort by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) to censure Omar and strip her of all her committee assignments over her criticism of the late conservative political activist Charlie Kirk. Omar has strenuously denied directly making the comments cited by Mace, and House Democrats rallied behind her.

“This is political theater. This is BS meant to bolster [Mace’s] gubernatorial bid,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark told reporters earlier Wednesday. “And frankly, she’s trying to monetize this.”

Four Republicans — Reps. Mike Flood of Nebraska, Jeff Hurd of Colorado, Tom McClintock of California and Cory Mills of Florida — supported the motion to kill Mace’s measure.

Mace brought up her measure through a fast-track process bypassing committees. Democrats immediately responded, with Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) calling up a retaliatory censure of Mills, who is subject to an ethics investigation and a restraining order proceeding. Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas) also signaled he would file articles of impeachment against Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel in response.

Omar, a Minnesota progressive, has long been a magnet for GOP criticism. The House GOP voted last Congress to boot Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. A small group of Republicans privately debated the potential fallout from a censure before Wednesday’s vote, aware it could trigger a deeper escalation of partisan censure efforts. “People forget that we can be in the minority someday,” one House Republican said. “But it’s also hard to defend her comments.”

Democrats might now pull back on their retaliatory measures. A similar Mills censure effort was dropped after a GOP-led effort targeting Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) was defeated on the House floor earlier this month.