For several weeks now, the Senate has tried, and failed, on 13 separate occasions to advance a short-term funding bill to reopen the government. But now, according to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, that bill has one pretty big problem: If it were to pass the Senate in the coming days, it wouldn’t reopen the government for a long enough time.
“The date is going to have to change,” Thune said Monday.
If the Senate had approved the House-passed short-term government funding bill on or before the beginning of the shutdown, it would have extended the funding deadline for seven weeks — until Nov. 21 — buying congressional appropriators nearly two months to continue their work on full-year funding bills before another funding deadline.
But that was 34 days ago. And now, on Nov. 3, that seven weeks of runway that the short-term bill would have given appropriators has shortened to two-and-a-half weeks.
Thune said that the Nov. 21 funding deadline that’s in the House bill will not give lawmakers enough time to work on full-year appropriations before staring down yet another shutdown. So, the Senate’s new strategy for government funding is going to involve some sort of change to the date, he said.
“That date is lost,” Thune told reporters Monday. “So, it’s a question now of what the next date is.”
Thune said he was open to ideas on new deadlines, including shifting the short-term funding bill to keep the government open until early 2026.
There are a number of ways that the Senate could go about changing the date if a bill like the one that Republicans are backing ever had the necessary Democratic support to advance. Thune kept a range of possibilities on the table: The Senate could approve the House bill and then amend it, or it could start in on a brand new bill.
But in either case, if the Senate eventually approves a funding bill with a new date, the House is going to have to come back into town to vote on it. The Senate bill won’t be able to simply head right to President Donald Trump’s desk. And that means Speaker Mike Johnson may have to call the House back to Washington for the first time in weeks if the Senate does eventually act.
There’s still no clear path out of the shutdown. Democrats continue to insist that Republicans need to engage in negotiations on health care in order to keep the government funded.
But after a weekend of talks between some rank-and-file members, Thune said he’s optimistic things could be shifting.
“Based on sort of my gut on how these things operate, I think we’re getting close to an off-ramp here,” Thune said. “But I again, I don’t know what — this is unlike any sort of government shutdown in terms of the way Democrats are reacting to it.”
Thune suggested that little has changed about what Republicans are willing to offer Democrats in exchange for the remaining votes they need to reopen the government. The offers remain about process and not about health care, as Democrats have demanded, so it’s not yet clear if this will be enough to secure the votes to move forward.
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