The Senate Democrats on Tuesday voted almost in unison to defeat a House-passed bill to fund the government through Nov. 21, putting Washington on the brink of a government shutdown that could last for days or even weeks.
Democrats are jittery about how the likely shutdown will play out over the next several days after President Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he would take “irreversible” actions to gut their priorities during a shutdown.
But they emerged from a long lunch meeting Tuesday with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) resolved to defeat the GOP-crafted funding bill, which they had previously rejected on Sept. 19.
The House measure needed 60 votes to pass, and it fell five votes short. Government funding expires at midnight, at which point a shutdown will begin.
Centrist Sens. John Fetterman (Pa.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.) were the only Democrats to vote for the Republican-drafted measure, as did Sen. Angus King (Maine), an independent who caucuses with Democrats.
Cortez Masto said she voted for the Republican funding bill because a government shutdown would hit Nevadans who are already dealing with high costs and an economic slowdown.
“This administration doesn’t care about Nevadans, but I do. That’s why I cannot support a costly shutdown that would hurt Nevada families and hand even more power to this reckless administration,” she said in a statement.
Fetterman, the only one of the three who had voted in favor of the same bill earlier this month, warned that a shutdown could empower Trump to further slash federal programs.
“The president has a lot of levers he could pull,” Fetterman warned reporters on Capitol Hill.
He said a shutdown would “be the ideal for Project 2025,” referring to the conservative blueprint for overhauling government that generated controversy during the 2024 presidential election.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), who voted against the House-passed stopgap when it came to the floor earlier this month, also voted in favor of it on Tuesday.
While Murkowski said she was open to reaching a compromise with Democrats on extending enhanced health insurance premium subsidies and protecting federal funded targeted by a White House pocket rescission, she wants to avoid a shutdown.
“We’ve got mere hours before the end of the fiscal year and so I’ve got no options now,” Murkowski said before a Republican lunch meeting.
“I’m not interested in seeing a continued shutdown,” she said.
The vote on the GOP proposal followed a vote on a Democratic alternative that would have funded the government until Oct. 31. That measure would have permanently extended enhanced health insurance premium subsidies under the Affordable Care Act that are due to expire in three months and restored nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts.
The Democratic proposal failed by a vote of 47-53 without support from a single Republican.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) touted the GOP House-passed measure as the only bill that has a chance of getting signed into law by Trump before government funding expires.
“I don’t know what the House can do that they haven’t already done,” he said, dismissing the possibility that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would bring House lawmakers back to Washington this week to vote on an alternative proposal to fund the government.
He said the pending GOP proposal is “a bill that’s passed by the House, sitting here in the Senate, ready to be signed into law by the president.”
He said Democrats will “be the ones that have to explain at midnight tonight why the government is shut down.”
Thune noted that the funding bill the Democrats defeated is the same kind of routine short-term funding bill that they passed 13 times to keep the government open when Democrats controlled the White House and Senate under President Biden.
He has filed a cloture motion to set up another vote on Wednesday to advance the House-passed continuing resolution, but it is unlikely to pick up much Democratic support.
The outcome of Tuesday’s vote was largely expected after a meeting between Trump and congressional leaders at the White House Monday failed to make any significant progress.
Trump almost appeared to goad Democrats into voting against the government funding bill by posting on social media an AI-generated parody video of Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) speaking at the White House.
The video depicted Jeffries wearing a crudely animated sombrero and handlebar mustache and played a fake voiceover of Schumer lamenting the political woes of the Democratic Party while Mexican music played in the background.
Schumer said the parody video posted by the president shows that he isn’t serious about negotiating with Democrats to keep the government funded.
“Hours away from a shutdown, which we don’t want, the American people don’t want, the president is busy trolling away on the Internet like 10-year-old. And that’s exactly why Americans are going to blame him if the government shuts down,” he fumed on the Senate floor.
Schumer argued during a press conference Tuesday that Trump and Republicans would come under “tremendous” pressure to reopen the government by agreeing to the Democratic demands to extend more generous health insurance subsidies, a hold-over policy from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s right now in the Republicans’ court. We’ve said this to Trump yesterday. He can easily call up Thune and Johnson and say, ‘Just add the two parts [Democrats] want added to the bill,’” Schumer said. “The American people are learning how bad this health care crisis is and they will put tremendous heat on Republicans to solve it.”
Democrats want to add language to the bill to extend the expiring health insurance premium subsidies and to prevent White House budget director Russ Vought from targeting congressionally appropriated funds with pocket rescissions.
Thune, however, ruled out the prospect of negotiating with Democrats on health care while the government is shut down.
“The negotiation happens when government is open,” he told reporters after meeting with his conference Tuesday.
The Republican leader said he’s open to negotiating an extension of the subsidies if Democrats agree to continue government funding but he said doing so would be part of a broader overhaul of the ACA to root out waste, fraud and abuse.
“We’re happy to sit down and talk about these other issues that they’re interested in but it should not have anything to do with whether or not for a seven-week period we keep the federal government open,” he said.
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