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No quick end to shutdown in sight on Capitol Hill

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Washington is waking up to its first government shutdown in nearly seven years. How many more days that will be the case, no one knows.

With President Donald Trump and congressional leaders not actively negotiating, there’s no sign the shutdown will be over before the end of the day. And with Congress dormant for Thursday’s Yom Kippur holiday, that all but ensures it will go until at least Friday if not far beyond.

Instead, Congress is poised to enact a reprise performance Wednesday: The Senate will vote on, and likely reject, dueling stopgap proposals for a third time, while House Democrats hold another closed-door meeting and House Republicans do not plan to return to the Capitol until next week at the earliest.

Leaders of both parties are digging in for a lengthy battle — ramping up the blame game and putting the onus on their political opponents to blink if they are going to quickly find a way to reopen shuttered agencies.

“It’s in their court to solve it — it’s their shutdown,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said of Republicans Tuesday.

“We are not going to be held hostage,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said. “There isn’t anything here to negotiate.”

Fueling the stalemate are perverse political incentives. Both parties believe the other will face a bigger voter backlash over the shutdown. Democrats are banking on Republicans shouldering the blame because they control the levers of power in Washington.

Under pressure from their base to show they are fighting Trump, they spent months honing a strategy to make health care, including extending insurance subsidies set to lapse at the end of the year, the centerpiece of their message going into this shutdown and next year’s midterm elections.

But Republicans are warning that if Democrats are banking on them quickly caving, they will be waiting — and agencies will be hamstrung — for quite some time. GOP leaders are set to hold a morning news conference outside the Capitol Wednesday to hammer Democrats and reiterate that there is one path out of the shutdown: a House-passed seven-week funding punt.

Asked if he was ruling out any talks on Democrats’ health care demands, Thune said, “The negotiation happens when the government opens.”

The trench warfare has lawmakers openly questioning whether they can find a way out of the showdown anytime soon. The atmosphere in the Capitol has darkened from just 48 hours ago when senators and aides were holding out faint hope that an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Democratic leaders would help shake loose some progress toward a deal.

Instead, the meeting produced no outward progress, and Trump has since poisoned the well by posting inflammatory deepfake videos depicting Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said he hoped a shutdown would be “short” as he cast doubt on Schumer’s ability to hold Senate Democrats together indefinitely.

“I don’t believe that 47 Democratic senators are going to want to walk the plank,” he said.

Republicans got a boost Tuesday night when Sens. Angus King (I-Maine) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) joined Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) to vote for the GOP-led House bill. Republicans are hoping they will be able to peel off five more Democrats as the shutdown continues, with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) among the senators they’re watching closely.

King critiqued the push from some corners of the Democratic base to use the shutdown battle to fight Trump, saying in a video explaining his vote that the “irony, the paradox, is by shutting the government, we’re actually giving Donald Trump more power.”

Thune left the door open for talks with Schumer after Tuesday’s votes, noting that the New York Democrat knows how to get a hold of him. But any conversations would happen against a backdrop of mounting political pressure.

Republicans will force a vote again Wednesday on their funding bill and plan to keep calling up the bill almost daily — including through this coming weekend — to try to squeeze the opposition. Speaker Mike Johnson and fellow House GOP leaders, meanwhile, are still mulling how to extract maximum pain from Democrats, including debating whether they’ll return next week as previously advised, according to two people granted anonymity to describe private deliberations.

Top Republicans, the people said, are wary of bringing the House back without a legislative fix to vote on and are also discussing what votes they could potentially force Democrats to take to inflict more political pain.

Senate Democrats have also been privately debating what steps they can take during a shutdown to try to keep pressure on Republicans and potentially create an off-ramp, according to two other people granted anonymity to disclose internal discussions.

Schumer remained unbowed after Tuesday night’s vote, saying “Republicans have failed to get enough votes to avoid a shutdown. They’ve got to sit down and negotiate with Democrats.”

But pressed on whether he could guarantee his caucus would stick together against the GOP bill, Schumer was less than definite: “The bottom line is, our guarantee is to the American people that we are going to fight as hard as we can for their health care,” he said.

While leadership-level relations stay chilly, rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats have engaged in quiet talks about possible paths out of the shutdown. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said it might be time to bring back the “talking stick,” an object passed around in bipartisan meetings of senators who helped end a brief shutdown in early 2018.

“I still have it,” a smiling Collins said.

Cortez Masto told reporters after her vote on Tuesday night that she’s “open to working with my colleagues across the aisle to extend the credits if that helps open the government again.”

Part of the discussions include potential reassurances on the Affordable Care Act credits that are key for Democrats. Other Republican senators are floating trial balloon olive branches to their Democratic colleagues.

Those talks, so far, haven’t reached critical mass. And some Republicans who support extending the credits worry the shutdown will make an eventual deal more complicated.

“This will put that on ice for a while,” said Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the Republicans who favors an extension. “I think the length of the shutdown will affect that. … Once you go off the cliff it’s hard to come back.”

Meredith Lee Hill and Calen Razor contributed to this report.

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Congress

DHS stopgap set for quick House action after Rules Committee vote

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The House Rules Committee advanced a measure Friday evening that would fund the entirety of the Homeland Security Department through May 22 — without setting up debate or a separate vote on the funding bill itself.

The panel, after a raucous meeting that devolved into shouting at multiple points, voted 8-4 on party lines to advance the measure to the floor.

The rule includes a “deem and pass” provision, a tactic that allows legislation to be passed by the House automatically once the rule itself is adopted. While there will be one hour of floor debate and a vote on the rule, there will not be a standalone House vote on the DHS spending bill.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) described himself as needing “a neck brace” from the whiplash of hearing Republicans argue for hours that the Senate’s early-morning voice vote on a different DHS funding measure was “shameful” for lack of transparency and accountability.

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) accused the Senate of moving their bill “in the middle of the night, with the smell of jet fumes in the air,” lamenting that the House was left “to take it or leave it.”

House leaders, McGovern suggested, have chosen a similar path by fast-tracking the eight-week DHS stopgap.

“You’re in charge,” he told Rules Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.). “You can do whatever the hell you want to do.”

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Congress

Rand Paul weighs a 2028 presidential bid

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is considering a bid for president in 2028, as Republicans jockey for the future of the GOP post-Trump.

In a “CBS Sunday Morning” interview airing Sunday, a reporter asked Paul about an article that implied he would be running for president.

“We’re thinking about it,” Paul said. “I would say fifty-fifty,” adding that he would make a final decision after the midterm elections.

Paul ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 with a libertarianism-focused campaign but ultimately dropped out after a poor performance in the Iowa caucuses and a shortage of cash. He instead ran for reelection to the Senate.

Paul has had a complex relationship with his own party and with President Donald Trump, often finding himself the lone Republican on certain issues. More recently, he was the only Republican to support a joint resolution that would limit Trump’s war powers in Iran.

His father, former Rep. Ron Paul, also ran for president three times: first as a Libertarian in 1988, and twice as a Republican in 2008 and 2012.

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Congress

‘Meltdown’: DHS shutdown set to drag on after House GOP rejects Senate deal

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House Republicans moved Friday to further extend the six-week shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security by rejecting a Senate bill that would fund the vast majority of DHS agencies through September.

Instead, Speaker Mike Johnson proposed a temporary extension of DHS funding through May 22 — a plan that has uncertain prospects in the House and certainly won’t pass the Senate before the shutdown becomes the longest funding lapse in U.S. history Saturday.

But Johnson said House Republicans simply could not swallow the Senate bill, which omits funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Border Patrol and some other parts of Customs and Border Protection.

“The Republicans are not going to be any part of any effort to reopen our borders or to stop immigration enforcement,” he said. “We are going to deport dangerous criminal illegal aliens because it is a basic function of the government. The Democrats fundamentally disagree.”

The move toward an eight-week stopgap creates a tactical gulf between Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who called an end to weeks of abortive bipartisan talks Thursday and pushed through the funding bill in hopes of tacking on funding later for ICE and CBP in a party-line budget reconciliation bill.

President Donald Trump has largely stayed out of the GOP infighting on Capitol Hill, keeping his criticism trained on Democrats. He ordered DHS to pay TSA officers Thursday as long security lines snarls more U.S. airports.

Johnson played down the split with his Senate counterpart, saying the Democratic leader there bore more blame for the impasse.

“I wouldn’t call John Thune the engineer of this,” he said. “Chuck Schumer and the Democrats in the Senate have forced this upon the Senate. I have to protect the House. … Our colleagues on this side understand this is not a game. We are not playing their games.”

Thune said early Friday morning he did not speak directly to Johnson in the final hours leading up to the Senate’s voice vote, but he said they had texted. He acknowledged he did not know in advance how the House would handle the Senate bill.

“Hopefully they’ll be around, and we can get at least a lot of the government opened up again, and then we’ll go from there,” he said.

Johnson made his game plan clear with House Republicans on a private call just minutes before addressing reporters in the Capitol, according to four people granted anonymity to describe the call. He warned that a failure to advance the short-term DHS stopgap would upend GOP plans for a reconciliation bill, the people said.

He suggested the Senate could quickly clear the stopgap measure once it passes the House. Most senators have left Washington for a recess running through April 13, but Johnson said the chamber could approve the House measure by unanimous consent at a planned pro forma session Monday.

But some House Republicans on the private call, including Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida, aired doubts it could pass the Senate — or even the House. Some fellow GOP centrists argued that the House should just swallow the Senate bill and end the standoff.

The House plan for a 60-day stopgap won a cold reception in the Senate, with even Republicans warning it will only prolong the partial government shutdown.

The plan is instead fueling frustration among both Republicans and Democrats who view House Republicans as essentially throwing temper tantrum. Three people granted anonymity to speak candidly each described the House as having a “meltdown.”

Schumer publicly slammed the House GOP plan Friday, saying it was “dead on arrival” across the Capitol, “and Republicans know it.”

A Senate GOP aide granted anonymity to speak candidly added that the quickest way to end the shutdown is for the House to pass the Senate bill.

Five people granted anonymity to comment on Senate dynamics said there was no possibility that Democrats would let the House GOP plan pass during the Senate’s brief pro forma sessions over the next two weeks. It would only take one Democratic senator to show up and object to any attempt to pass it.

The bill, according to the five people, also can’t get 60 votes in the Senate once the chamber returns. Democrats have previously rejected even shorter stopgaps, leaving some to privately question why House Republicans would ever think their plan would work.

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