Congress

Republicans embrace hardball moves as shutdown enters Week 3

Published

12 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

Lummis blocks resolution denouncing Trump’s ‘public service announcements’

Published

2 hours ago

September 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A Republican senator blocked a resolution Tuesday that would have denounced President Donald Trump’s recent campaign-style ads funded with taxpayer dollars.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming objected to Sen. Maggie Hassan’s nonbinding resolution, which said it was the sense of the Senate that the ads “should not be paid for by the United States government.” Because Hassan (D-N.H.) was trying to pass the resolution without a formal vote, any one senator could block it.

“It just tells the president that he is wrong — that these ads need to be pulled down and that they should not be paid for with taxpayer dollars,” Hassan said on the floor.

Lummis however countered that Hassan’s concerns about the ads say “more about her side of the aisle” and compared Trump’s ads to President Bill Clinton’s antidrug campaign, among others. One of the ads Trump is running at taxpayer expense is virtually identical to a 2024 campaign ad.

“When a Democratic president tells Americans what to do, it’s a public service,” Lummis said. “When this president tells Americans that liberty is worth defending, it’s a problem.”

Congress

Republicans wanted Jack Smith to give them a smoking gun. They got a gaffe instead.

Published

2 hours ago

September 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

It started with a pledge to expose a Biden-era conspiracy to take down President Donald Trump. It ended with a botched attack over basketball tickets.

Armed with subpoena power in Congress and a friendly Justice Department on their side, Republican lawmakers have spent two years promising to expose former special counsel Jack Smith as the leader of an anti-Trump witch hunt that morphed into a full-blown attempt to take down the Republican establishment.

Smith’s appearance Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee — his third time testifying under oath on Capitol Hill, the second time in public — was supposed to be a watershed moment for the GOP intent on extracting a smoking gun ahead of the midterm elections. Instead, the hearing was most memorable for the fusillade of insults hurled by the panel’s Republicans.

Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri unsuccessfully sought to implicate Smith in a plot to attend a sporting event as a cover for investigating Trump election interference claims, then called him a “dirtbag.” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said the former prosecutor made him “want to throw up in my mouth.” And Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, comparing him to “Javert from ‘Les Mis,’” said Smith’s probe was “the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice.”

Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley insisted the hearing was “not the end” of his investigative work, but the four-hour grilling had the feeling of finality. The Republican-led probe into Smith’s efforts to bring criminal charges against the president has already stretched for two years, and Democrats stand a chance of retaking control of Congress in the midterms.

And at least one Republican member of the panel, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, said he believed the investigation into Smith had run its course in Congress.

“At this point, I think we kind of know what we know,” Hawley said in an interview following the hearing. “I think at this point, it’s up to the DOJ to either prosecute him for perjury for lying under oath, which I think the House has formally referred him for … or try to have him disbarred.”

Judiciary Committee Republicans did little Tuesday to challenge the substance of Smith’s criminal case against Trump for seeking to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Smith reinforced his contention that Trump mounted an unprecedented criminal assault on the transfer of power, seeking to derail Joe Biden’s victory and then capitalizing on the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol — unleashed by a mob of his supporters — to further that goal.

Smith also defended the work of his staff and decried the Trump-led Justice Department’s decision to fire them as “illegal.” And he made his most forceful case yet that the probe he led was actually fueled by Republican witnesses who broke from Trump over his handling of the 2020 election.

”It’s very hard to understand how our investigation can be viewed as partisan when the strongest witnesses, the people who were the difference between the rule of law and not, were Republicans,” Smith said.

When Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) ripped into Smith for secretly obtaining her late brother Lindsey Graham’s phone records as part of his inquiry, Smith hailed him as a “patriotic public servant” and who likely would have been a featured witness in Trump’s trial — because he eventually concluded Trump’s election fraud claims were false.

Smith similarly hailed Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and former Vice President Mike Pence as heroic figures who were crucial witnesses against the president. Smith ultimately dropped his case after Trump prevailed in the 2024 election. Though he said he remained confident in his ability to secure a conviction at trial, Smith emphasized that Justice Department policy forbids criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

When they weren’t lobbing personal attacks at Smith, Republicans homed in on what they described as procedural flaws of Smith’s investigation. They criticized him for subpoenaing phone records of members of Congress, like Lindsey Graham, who communicated with Trump and his administration during the post-2020 election timeframe.

They hit Smith for securing court orders that prevented telecom companies from alerting lawmakers to those subpoenas, and challenged his respect for the constitutional protections members of Congress are afforded to avoid scrutiny from federal prosecutors. That line of questioning produced one of the only bipartisan moments of the hearing: a pitch by Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) for legislation that would limit the ability of prosecutors to obtain secrecy orders when they issue subpoenas in sensitive probes.

Lee is poised to be the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the next Congress if Republicans maintain control of the chamber.

Smith used his appearance, as well as friendly questions from the panel’s Democrats, to parry GOP criticism of his tactics. He followed all Justice Department policies and laws, he insisted, and said he had respect for the separation of powers — including Congress’ constitutional protection from executive branch scrutiny.

Smith said he never targeted GOP lawmakers but pursued critical evidence of Trump’s actions and state of mind that would have been necessary to prove his case in court, and he repeatedly returned to an overarching contention: that he had enough evidence to convict Trump of “one of the most serious crimes that’s ever happened in our nation’s history.”

He also reminded lawmakers what he couldn’t say: anything at all about his charges against Trump for hoarding classified information at Mar-a-Lago. Smith’s findings in that probe remain sealed from public view by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who has ordered the Justice Department to keep it secret.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said subpoenaing that report would be one of Democrats’ first actions should they have the majority in the next Congress.

Ultimately, Smith’s hearing Tuesday may end up being best remembered for a high-profile gaffe by Schmitt, who accused Smith of secretly traveling to Atlanta at the very moment local prosecutor Fani Willis — who had also charged Trump over the 2020 election scheme — was facing damaging questions about her conduct. As proof, displayed on an elaborate poster, Schmitt offered text messages suggesting that Smith attended a basketball game on Feb. 3, 2024 — the same day the Atlanta Hawks played the Golden State Warriors.

Schmitt revelled as a clearly flummoxed Smith struggled to discern what Schmitt was talking about.

“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff,” Schmitt said. “So I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself.”

After a few moments, Smith did recall having attended a basketball game — but not in Atlanta. It wasn’t the Hawks his colleagues were discussing in a series of texts, Smith explained, but the Hawkeyes, whose star Caitlin Clark was playing in Maryland that day.

“It was because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play, and so we went to the game,” Smith said.

Immediately after the exchange, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) fact-checked Schmitt in real-time, confirming the date of the Iowa-Maryland game and suggested that her colleagues’ reliance on “false information based on confusion about the name of a team” warranted an apology.

“You don’t call someone a dirtbag when you haven’t done your own research and you don’t have your facts straight,” Klobuchar said after the hearing. “And it just shows how completely out of control this whole thing was.”

Schmitt did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his allegations.

Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.

Congress

Cruz blocks Senate Democrats’ bid to pass AI safety bill

Published

5 hours ago

September 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A Democratic trio attempted to pass an artificial intelligence bill via a unanimous consent request on Tuesday but were blocked on the Senate floor.

Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) sought to pass their Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act using the procedural mechanism, which allows expedited consideration of legislation but fails if one senator opposes it.

“The whole world has recognized that we’ve got to do something,” Warner said in a speech on the floor. “We should not miss the moment to put a safety protocol in place now.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) objected to the bill, preventing any chance of passage.

“Congress must not legislate on the issue of artificial intelligence hastily or in a closed manner,” he said on the floor, adding that it gave some in the government too much power to dictate the technology that could be permitted to be released.

As some lawmakers grow concerned over dire warnings from AI labs’ top executives about the technology’s risk to humanity, Congress’ attempts to legislate AI guardrails have largely stalled.

In the past few weeks, two other AI-related bills, the Ratepayer Protection Act and AI Emergency Button Act, were also nixed in an attempt to pass them unanimously.

Warner, Schatz and Kim’s new bill would have established a new safety board within the Commerce Department to vet models before they are deployed and set safety standards for the industry. It would also have created a reporting process for safety and security incidents.