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Shutdown near certain after Senate again rejects funding bills

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A government shutdown is now all but inevitable.

Senators rejected dueling spending stopgap bills on Tuesday, including aHouse-passed continuing resolution that was the final off-ramp to avoid a government shutdown set to start at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday.

There’s no sign of any further breakthrough that could avert a shutdown before midnight — and even if there was, it would be next to impossible for lawmakers to act on it. Quick Senate action would require the consent of all 100 senators, and passing anything other than the House-approved CR would require the other chamber to act.

Speaker Mike Johnson sent his members home until Monday in a bid to pressure the Senate to swallow what the House already passed: a seven-week punt.

Faced with the impasse, lawmakers and the White House spent Tuesday trading barbs over who was to blame for the first government closure since 2019.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said ahead of the vote that Democrats would “have the same leverage on Nov. 21,” when the House-passed measure expires: “This is a short-term CR, this is the same thing we do all the time, it funds the government until Nov. 21.”

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, however, quickly retorted that Thune “did not come to me one time to say, ‘Is this bill acceptable? What do you want in the bill?’ They call it bipartisan. It is not. That is not how you negotiate. That is not how you pass appropriations bills.”

Just as party leaders were unable to find a mutually agreeable off-ramp ahead of the shutdown, they aren’t anywhere close to an agreement on how to get out of it.

Senate Republicans believe they have the upper hand because they are asking for Democrats to vote on a “clean” short-term punt — similar to proposals Democrats have supported in the past. They were encouraged Tuesday when the House-passed bill failed on the Senate floor in an 55-45 vote Tuesday — with three Democrats voting for it.

That was a better showing for the GOP than in a prior vote 11 days ago, when Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was the only Democrat to join with Republicans. This time Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto and Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, joined him. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was the only Republican voting no.

“We should be working on bipartisan solutions to address the global health care crisis, but that doesn’t mean we should be swapping harm from one group of Americans to another,” Cortez-Masto told reporters amid the vote.

Trump is warning he will make the shutdown particularly painful for Democrats, with GOP lawmakers expecting blue states to be hardest hit given the flexibility the administration has in determining what federal agencies and programs are essential.

“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them — like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like,” Trump warned Tuesday in the Oval Office.

The president even suggested that medical programs and benefits could be casualties of the shutdown. “We can cut large numbers of people out,” Trump said, even though programs like Medicaid and Medicare are funded permanently and can continue operating during a shutdown.

White House Budget Chief Chief Russ Vought has also threatened toengage in mass layoffs of federal workers during a shutdown, in addition to the usual temporary furloughs.

Responding to a letter from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the Congressional Budget Officeestimated Tuesday that about 750,000 employees could be furloughed each day and that the total daily cost of their compensation would be roughly $400 million. The nonpartisan scorekeeper previously estimated that about $3 billion in lost real GDP would never be recovered after the record 35-day government shutdown that ended in 2019.

House Democrats returned to Washington Monday to draw a contrast with the House GOP’s absence. Democratic leaders are planning a full-bore messaging campaign through the week with multiple daily news conferences and events, focused on their demand for a bipartisan negotiation over health care.

Before voting down the House-passed stopgap Tuesday evening, the Senate again defeated a counterproposal from Democrats that would fund the government through Oct. 31 and reverse $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid from the GOP tax and spending megabill, while also permanently extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire.

TheDemocrats’ bill would also restrict the president’s authority to withhold congressionally approved funding — akey fault line for many Democrats, who are not inclined to ink any spending deal with Republicans if Trump can simply not adhere to it.

While Senate Republicans have signaled support for negotiating on the ACA credits — a few of them have even endorsed a one-year extension — they believe any deal has to wait until after the government reopens.

This is the second time in a matter of weeks that both short-term funding bills have been voted on by the Senate, and failed. Senate Democrats used a closed-door lunch on Tuesday to discuss what would come next after the dueling stopgap bills failed.

Thune said he expected to hold yet another vote Wednesday on the GOP bill to continue putting pressure on Democrats to blink.

“At some point, they’re just going to need to keep voting it down,” he told reporters. “There are ways to trigger those votes. And we’ll keep looking for those opportunities. So they’ll get the opportunity to vote.”

Cassandra Dumay 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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