Congress
Senate fails for the sixth time to pass a government funding bill
The Senate rejected dueling government funding bills for the sixth time Wednesday amid growing frustration over the shutdown stalemate.
The back-to-back votes come as there’s no sign of a quick offramp, with congressional leaders only becoming further entrenched the longer the funding lapse drags on.
Pouring new fuel into the standoff — and catching top Republicans off guard — was a recent suggestion from White House officials that furloughed federal workers might not get back pay. Yet more than a week since lawmakers blew past the deadline to fund government operations, party leaders continue to talk past each other in press conferences, television interviews and social media posts.
“We are in Day Eight of the government shutdown, which is unfortunate and unnecessary and totally at the behest of left-wing Democrats’ special interest groups who have pressured the Democrat leadership into a position that makes absolutely no sense to any thinking person,” Majority Leader John Thune said ahead of the vote.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reiterated that Democrats are ready to discuss both government funding and health care.
“This is not an either-or-thing, which Republicans are making it,” Schumer said.
Democrats believe the first step to breaking the impasse involves Republicans at least talking to colleagues across the aisle. Top Republicans, however, are solidified in their stance that there is nothing to negotiate on soon-to-expire Affordable Care Act subsidies before reopening the government.
“The only way they’ve communicated is through these AI meme videos, which is a ridiculous way to run a country,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) said in a brief interview. “You get to an outcome by actually talking to each other, not by press conferences, not by silly meme videos.”
The House has been out of session since last month, with Speaker Mike Johnson vowing he won’t bring the chamber back until the Senate passes the GOP-led stopgap bill, which funds the government through Nov. 21.
“When the House agrees on something that’s not offensive … you ought to take it with a bow, thank them for it and pass the damn thing,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who served in the House for six years, said in a brief interview. “If we send something more complicated back to the House, I just think we run the risk of it collapsing.”
Thune plans to make the chamber vote as soon as Thursday for the seventh time on both the Republican stopgap and the Democratic alternative, which would run through Oct. 31 and force Republicans’ hands with health care concessions and guardrails around spending. The same, failed outcome for each bill is all but guaranteed.
“You’ve got to ask our Democratic colleagues,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) when asked if he expected a different result.
A bipartisan group of senators are having conversations about what could happen once the government reopens as far as the fate of the ACA credits and the appropriations process, but so far those talks have not garnered enough Democratic support.
Ohio Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown said Sunday that a “technical glitch” with Facebook’s advertising platform caused around half of his campaign ads on the site to suddenly “go dark with no notice.”
“For the past 48 hours, half of our ads have been unable to reach grassroots supporters and voters,” Brown said in a post to his Substack that both detailed the snafu and served as a fundraising appeal. Brown estimated the issue was costing his campaign “thousands and thousands of dollars — and potentially thousands of votes.”
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Facebook parent Meta, confirmed in a statement that “an error over the weekend impacted the delivery of ads for several advertisers, including the Brown campaign.”
“All of the Brown campaign’s ads have since been restored,” Stone said. “We apologize for the error.”
Neither Brown nor Stone immediately responded to followup questions about whether the Brown campaign would receive a reimbursement for the glitch.
A tally of Meta advertising data for Brown’s political account shows he has spent over a half-million dollars with the company across multiple campaigns. Brown, a former senator, is mounting a comeback against Republican Sen. Jon Husted.
GOP Sen. Jim Justice said Wednesday that he’ll decide whether to run for West Virginia governor before the end of the year but likely not until after the midterms.
“The timeline is short, because I don’t want to jerk you around,” Justice said. “I don’t want to jerk people around.”
Justice said he initially wanted to make a decision before the Nov. 3 elections, “but, you know, what’s happened is, we’ve been so busy, time just gets away, and now, you know. it may very well be best to wait and go after.”
Blue Light News first reported earlier this month that Justice was considering another governor bid and was viewed as likely to run.
Justice added he was hearing from Republican Party leaders in the state “in only one way, and that’s, please run for governor.”
Justice said he hasn’t spoken to President Donald Trump about whether or not he should run or stay in the Senate. He said he also hasn’t spoken to the sitting Republican governor, Patrick Morrisey.
A close Capitol Hill ally of President Donald Trump is suing the Justice Department and former special counsel Jack Smith for obtaining her phone logs in the course of his investigation into Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) filed suit a day after Smith testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee — on which Blackburn sits — and defended his office’s investigation, including its effort to obtain the records of Blackburn and dozens of other GOP lawmakers who spoke with Trump and his advisers during a four-day period in January 2021.
Blackburn argues that Smith committed a “gross abuse of power” and violated constitutional protections for members of Congress when he subpoenaed her phone logs from Verizon and secured a court order to prevent the company from alerting her. She’s asking a federal judge to declare Smith’s entire probe, as well as his effort to obtain her phone records, was illegal. She’s also asking that the judge order Smith and the Justice Department destroy or return any of her materials.
Smith contended that he sought the phone logs — which don’t include the content of calls or text messages — as part of his probe into Trump’s bid to overturn the election results, even as a mob of his supporters were ransacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump and his aides continued to work the phones that night and encourage lawmakers to derail the transfer of power to Joe Biden.
Smith insisted that his effort to obtain lawmakers’ phone records was cleared by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section and complied with all department regulations.
But senators said his effort to obtain those call records ran afoul of the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, which provides blanket immunity for lawmakers from being scrutinized by prosecutors for their official business.
Stan Brand, former counsel to the House of Representatives under former Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.), said Blackburn may have a worthy case to test whether members of Congress can win legal relief for violations of the speech or debate clause. That issue is more commonly litigated during criminal cases and before investigators can access members’ records. But in this case, Brand said, the purported violation had already occurred without her knowledge.
“How do you remedy that after the fact?” Brand said. “I think it’s worthy of consideration.”
Blackburn’s lawsuit could put the Justice Department in a bind. Though Trump himself has attacked Smith’s investigation as unconstitutional — and U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon concluded Smith’s appointment was illegal — the Justice Department has never conceded that point. And DOJ has long defended its practice of obtaining secrecy orders from federal courts to prevent telecom companies from disclosing subpoenas to their subscribers.
In 2023, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for Smith’s team to access a subset of records it seized from Rep. Scott Perry’s (R-Pa.) phone, though it ruled that courts had to conduct a “fact-specific” inquiry to determine whether some records were “legislative” in nature and therefore off-limits to investigators.
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