WASHINGTON — At the two-week mark, Republicans and Democrats are bracing for a long government shutdown, with both parties seeing more upside in persisting with their conflicting demands.
As a result, neither side is willing to give an inch in the standoff, now the fifth-longest shutdown in the country’s history.
Republicans say their message is simple: Senate Democrats should vote for the short-term funding bill to reopen the government that passed the House last month and pursue their policy demands separately. They accuse Democrats of holding the government “hostage” to their goals.
But Democrats are eager to continue a national debate they’ve forced about a looming health care cliff, by demanding any funding bill be tied to addressing expiring Obamacare subsidies. The health care money is popular, even among self-described MAGA supporters, and has divided Republicans — although they are unified in saying it must be dealt with separately, outside the context of a government funding bill.
“It feels like both parties are digging their trenches and preparing for a long conflict,” said Ian Russell, a former national political director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “This is Washington, so things can obviously change very quickly. But you get the sense from leadership suites on both sides that both parties feel like they’re either maximizing their strengths or certainly not exposing themselves to serious vulnerabilities.”
The Senate is scheduled to vote Tuesday for the eighth time on the GOP’s short-term funding bill, which requires 60 votes to advance. Republicans need at least five more Democrats to break a filibuster and have made no progress since the shutdown began.
Russell said Democrats see the Obamacare funding as a way to “reset the narrative” and “unite” a party that has clashed about the way forward after their devastating defeat in 2024.
“We took back the House in 2018 while campaigning on health care. We’re able to unite the factions in our own path when we’re talking about health care,” Russell said. “For Democratic leadership it makes sense to have this fight now, on these terms.”
Earlier this week, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said the nation could be “barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history.”
Recent polls show that more voters are generally blaming President Donald Trump and Republicans for the shutdown than Democrats. But a Reuters/Ipsos survey released last week showed that clear majorities of Americans are placing “at least a fair amount” of blame on Trump, Republicans and Democrats.
The overall public opinion deficit for the GOP is narrow enough not to move them off their position — particularly as Trump has taken on a posture of all-out political war with Democrats, including by telling GOP leaders not to bother negotiating with the opposition in the run-up to the shutdown.
On Tuesday, Johnson insisted — again — that he won’t negotiate with Democrats on their demands because House Republicans have already passed a stopgap funding measure with no extraneous policy provisions.
“I don’t have anything to negotiate. … We did not load up the temporary funding bill with any Republican priorities or partisan priorities at all. I don’t have anything that I can take off of that document to make it more palatable for them,” Johnson told reporters at his daily shutdown news conference in the Capitol.
“So all I am able to do is come to this microphone every day, look right under the camera and plead with the American people … to call your Senate Democrats and ask them to do the right thing,” he continued. “We’re not playing games; they’re playing a game.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., praised Senate Democrats on Tuesday for continuing to block the GOP funding bill, while saying he’s “flummoxed” that House Republicans are keeping the chamber in recess for a fourth consecutive week.
He said Democrats aren’t intimidated by the White House’s attempts to lay off federal workers.
“For the Republicans, cruelty is the point,” Jeffries said. “And the fact that they are celebrating, meaning the extremist, the extreme MAGA Republicans, the fact that they’re celebrating firing hard-working federal employees doesn’t strengthen their position with the American people. It weakens it because the American people don’t accept that kind of cruel and callous behavior.”
The war of words between the party leaders comes as Trump and his administration have begun to mitigate some of the critical pain points of the shutdown that were expected to drive the two sides to the negotiating table.
A food aid program assisting women, infants and children had been set to run out of money because of the shutdown, but Trump officials said they would shift $300 million in tariff revenue to the WIC program to keep it running temporarily.
This Wednesday was a key date, with more than 1 million active-duty service members set to miss their first paycheck due to the shutdown impasse. But Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to move money around again to ensure the troops got paid.
Hundreds of thousands civilian federal workers, however, have missed part of their paychecks and will miss a full paycheck on Oct. 24. And many government contractors also are not being paid during the shutdown, and won’t receive backpay unlike federal workers.
Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday representing Maryland and Virginia — states with a large number of federal workers — railed against what they described as Trump’s “illegal” move Friday to fire roughly 4,000 federal workers through a “reduction in force,” or RIF.
“This is unjust. It is unjustified, and this is the feeling that we’ve awakened with this morning,” Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., said in her message to federal workers. “But I want them to recognize that another morning is surely coming, that none of this is sustainable. This evil cannot last.”
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump threatened to inflict more pain on the opposition by shutting down “Democrat programs.”
“So we’re closing up programs that are Democrat programs that we wanted to close up … and we’re not going to let them come back. The Democrats are getting killed, and we’re going to have a list of them on Friday,” Trump said. “We’re not closing up Republican programs because we think they work.”
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