Congress

Shutdown threatens to drag on for days as positions harden

Published

9 months ago

October 6, 2025

Buckle in — this shutdown might last a while.

With federal agencies closed going into a second workweek, there are vanishingly few signs that a bipartisan breakthrough is imminent. To the contrary, all indications are that leaders in both parties are only digging in deeper, and efforts to forge a compromise among the Senate rank-and-file are so far sputtering.

Already some lawmakers are eyeing Oct. 15 — the date when active-duty military members could miss their next paycheck — as the next real deadline for action.

Democrats are insisting they will not vote to reopen the government without some kind of an agreement around soon-to-expire health insurance subsidies impacting more than 20 million Americans, and party leaders have been emboldened by flash polling giving them a modest advantage.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, said Republicans are “losing in the court of public opinion” and vowed to continue “standing up for the health care of hard-working American taxpayers.” A CBS News poll released Sunday was the latest of several new surveys showing a small majority of respondents taking the side of Democrats in the shutdown blame game.

Republican leaders, meanwhile, continue to insist any discussions about health care can happen only after Senate Democrats reopen the government by passing a House-approved seven-week stopgap.

Speaker Mike Johnson said in an BLN interview Sunday that lawmakers “need the month of October” to hammer out a deal on the subsidies: “There’s a lot of thought that’s gone into that on both sides of the aisle. But we need folks in good faith to come around the table and have that discussion. And we can’t do it when the government is shut down.”

Those talking points have barely shifted from a week ago, when Congress was still on the precipice of plunging into a shutdown. Now, more than five days in, some leaders have their eyes on some key dates they believe could force action.

Most federal workers will miss their first paychecks Friday if agencies don’t reopen by then. Active-duty military members will miss their pay the following Wednesday if Congress does not act.

Speaking to House Republicans on a private conference call Saturday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise identified that latter date as a key pressure point and urged members to hammer Democrats as it approached.

President Donald Trump also alluded to the sensitivity of troop pay in a speech Sunday to a crowd of sailors and others celebrating the Navy’s 250th anniversary: “I want you to know that despite the current Democrat-induced shutdown, we will get our service members every last penny. Don’t worry about it.”

Trump and his deputies are seeking to add to the pressure by threatening to proceed with mass layoffs of federal employees as the shutdown wears on. Top economic adviser Kevin Hassett described potential firings Sunday as a sort of Sword of Damocles that will hang over Democrats in the coming days.

“We think that the Democrats, there’s a chance that they’ll be reasonable once they get back into town on Monday,” he said on BLN. “And if they are, I think there’s no reason for those layoffs.”

But the layoff threats have only caused Democrats to dig in more. Many inside their ranks are calling the spectre of firings a bluff, arguing Trump has no more legal authority to carry out such firings in a shutdown than he would otherwise and that any such moves would be quickly challenged in court.

And even swing-state Democrats are growing comfortable fighting for the position Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have staked out for them: extending the insurance subsidies ahead of Nov. 1, when open enrollment begins for next year’s plans offered on Affordable Care Act exchanges.

“Twenty-four million Americans are going to have their premiums increase. Millions of them are going to lose their coverage,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) said in an interview. “Any answer to the shutdown has to involve fixing that.”

Gallego has been part of a bipartisan group of rank-and-file senators who have been holding informal conversations about finding a way out of the shutdown. But so far the discussions have remained nebulous.

While leadership talking points have hardened, there are tensions inside both parties that could grow over the coming days and weeks and bring matters to a head.

House GOP leaders decided Friday not to return to session this week — driven by both a belief that they have nothing further to do after approving the seven-week stopgap last month and concern that having members of the more boisterous chamber together on Capitol Hill would not help the party stick to its message. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) flatly said the House would only make things “worse.”

“This is not a game,” Johnson told reporters at the Capitol last weekend. “I don’t know why this is so complicated.”

In contrast, some in the speaker’s leadership circle quietly bristled at Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s decision to recess his own chamber for the weekend after another stopgap vote failed Friday, according to three people granted anonymity to describe private conversations.

They privately argued Senate Republicans were giving up an opportunity to keep hammering Democrats. The House’s absence continued to fuel Democratic attacks over the weekend.

“House Republicans continue to be on vacation, spread out across the country and the world and this makes no sense,” Jeffries told reporters Friday. He brought his own members back to town last week but has not made similar plans for this week; House Democrats are set to hold a conference call Monday evening.

In past shutdowns, the majority party has often held votes to reopen particularly popular parts of the federal government in a bid to put pressure on the minority. Senate GOP leaders have no such plans at this point, but Johnson and Thune could bring up legislation to pay troops as the Oct. 15 paycheck deadline nears. Some Republicans, though, still believe Democrats will fold before then.

“We might not even be in a shutdown at that point,” said one senior GOP leadership aide, granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal thinking.

The more profound GOP divide, however, concerns the health insurance subsidies. Republicans from the White House to Capitol Hill leadership suites privately admit the party is increasingly vulnerable on health care but are now committed to an argument that they cannot undertake any negotiations until the shutdown ends while also accusing Democrats of wanting to protect services for undocumented immigrants.

Asked about his position on the subsidies, Trump said Sunday, “We want to fix it so it works.” He said the ACA in general was “not working” and “has been a disaster for the people,” but there is little appetite inside the White House or the GOP generally for reopening the landmark 2010 health law.

Inside the White House, even some of Trump’s most hard-line deputies are coming around to the political realities they face with the coming insurance cliff. Policy officials are readying proposals around the expiring tax credits — one, according to three people granted anonymity to comment on the proposals ahead of an announcement, could include grandfathering in current beneficiaries and cutting off boosted subsidies for new enrollees.

Democrats are dealing with internal splits of their own, with Schumer caught in the middle. Some of his moderate members want to find a quick exit from the shutdown and are exploring a framework deal that could open the government and set up further talks on the ACA subsidies. But others — including Jeffries — want nothing less than an ironclad legislative deal in writing to extend the subsidies first.

“We’ve seen the president — once Democrats and Republicans have agreed on budgets — come along later to rescind those things. So we need something more, much stronger than a promise,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) told reporters last week.

Schumer, for now, is content to highlight the divides on the Republican side — and he is pushing Trump to get involved in talks now.

“Johnson and a whole lot of his caucus don’t like the ACA, don’t want to do the extensions. A lot of Republican senators in the Senate do, but they’re not enough,” Schumer said Friday. “You need Johnson, and you particularly need Trump, to get it done.”

Jordain Carney, Nicholas Wu and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.

Congress

Rubio, Witkoff to brief Congress on Iran

Published

27 minutes 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

3 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.

Congress

Republicans get antsy about confirmations as the Senate hangs in the balance

Published

6 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump is showing little urgency in sending nominations to the Senate even as the GOP’s control of the chamber beyond 2026 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.

“Ultimately, we need to have the right people in those positions,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to describe internal thinking. “So if it’s acting for now, so be it. If [it] takes a little while to find that perfect person, then it takes a little while.”

That’s unsettling some Republican senators who are anxious to fill spots ahead of the midterms, a daunting task given the legislative calendar and host of competing GOP priorities.

“We’re running short on time,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), a member of the Senate HELP Committee, which oversees health, labor and other issues. “We’d love to get at least one or two of them and get it in the next tranche.”

As far as judges, Tuberville said he wants to see “as many as we can get” nominated, adding, “I don’t know why we don’t have more.”

Trump’s apparent nonchalance — particularly over judges — is a marked departure from his first term, when he opined that appointing people to the bench might be the “single most important thing you do” as president. But as the Senate left for a two-week recess Thursday, there were only 10 nominees pending for 29 judicial vacancies.

The vacancies come amid ongoing tensions between the Senate and Trump, who has put pressure on the chamber to pass the GOP elections bill known as the SAVE America Act, going so far as to cancel a planned Wednesday signing of a bipartisan housing bill.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he “absolutely” wants to see the president nominate more judges before the end of the year. Texas has three court vacancies with zero nominees.

“And that’s one of his greatest legacies, both first term and second,” Cruz said of Trump.

Trump is on pace with his first term in total confirmations in part because Republicans changed the Senate rules last year to confirm slates of civilian posts at once by a simple majority vote.

One tranche confirmed in Mayincluded 49 nominees, from ambassadors to midlevel posts at various federal agencies. So far, 502 of Trump’s second-term nominees have been confirmed, compared to 509 at this point during his first term and 601 at the same point during former President Joe Biden’s term.

Federal judges and members of the Cabinet still have to be confirmed individually, despite the rule change for other posts.

Trump inherited only about 40 judicial vacancies for his current term, fewer than any president since Ronald Reagan. Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) previously complained that the White House hasn’t nominated more judges. More recently, though, he’s blaming his committee for not acting more quickly on the already pending nominees.

“Right now it’s hard for me to blame the White House when in the last three executive weeks, we were supposed to have meetings to vote judges out, we couldn’t have enough members present,” Grassley said in an interview.

A White House official said “Trump plans to nominate well qualified individuals to fill these vacancies.”

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said he’s had “a couple good discussions” with the White House about a circuit court vacancy, which he expects the administration to fill. As a Judiciary Committee member, he can block any nominee that doesn’t get support from Democrats.

“If it’s somebody I support, I’ll vote for them. If it’s somebody I don’t support, I’ll vote no,” Kennedy said. “It’s an important spot. They know I’m on Judiciary, and they know I’ll vote no if I don’t agree.”

The Labor secretary and FDA commissioner picks, meanwhile, go through the HELP committee — chaired by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who lost his primary last month after Trump endorsed a challenger.

Republicans have been left in the dark about those nominees, some on the panel say.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said he’s heard “nothing at all” and “radio silence” from administration. Another GOP senator, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they’ve heard nothing from the administration about its thinking or plans for a Labor secretary nominee specifically.

The HELP Committee membership poses challenges for the administration. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) previously expressed concerns about Casey Means’ nomination as surgeon general before Trump pulled her, for example. And the dynamic between the president and the chair could be a hurdle, three people granted anonymity to comment on the process said.

“Why give Cassidy a platform to get back at DJT?” one of them said.

Another, a GOP senator, predicted Cassidy would “play games” with nominees who have to go through his committee.

“I really don’t think a lot of senators are in any mood to give the president any wins because they’re frustrated with him,” said the third person, who is close to the White House.

But confirming nominees before he leaves the Senate could be a priority for Cassidy, one of the few Republican doctors to push the administration toward public health nominees who align with established science on issues like vaccines.

A potential successor — Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — is a critic of the vaccine and masking standards set during the pandemic and would likely set the committee on a different path.

Recent appointees such as Nicole Saphier for surgeon general and Erica Schwartz for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director are more mainstream than some past HHS appointees like Means and Dave Weldon, who was nominated for CDC director before the administration determined he didn’t have the votes.

Those nominees have been moving through the regular process, including meeting with Cassidy and other senators ahead of confirmation hearings.

Cassidy told reporters after he lost his primary that he would “vote for the good of my country and the good of my state.”

“There’s some nominees that have not gotten through committee for whatever reason, so that’s not anything new,” he added. “That’ll just be part of the process.”

A HELP Committee spokesperson added Thursday that Cassidy has voted for every Trump nominee and that the panel will “do its job to confirm qualified nominees and serve the American people.”

“Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” the spokesperson added.

The White House official said “Trump remains committed to nominating highly qualified individuals for a variety of posts that are aligned with the agenda the American people elected him to enact” and will continue to send nominees to the Senate, including to the HELP Committee.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in an interview he had not spoken to the White House about their plans for some of the major picks under HELP jurisdiction but he encouraged the administration to send nominees.

“I think it’s always better to have people in permanent positions rather than temporary,” Thune added.

Megan Messerly contributed to this report.