Congress

Republicans embrace hardball moves as shutdown enters Week 3

Published

9 months ago

October 13, 2025

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.”

Congress

Senate Ethics dismisses allegations against Ruben Gallego

Published

2 hours 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

6 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

8 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.