970x125
Last Tuesday’s off-year elections have altered the shutdown fight, just not in the way many on Capitol Hill had hoped.
Heading into last week, lawmakers on both sides had felt glimmers of optimism that they were on a path to dissolving the budget impasse. Centrist senators in both parties were negotiating over a potential spending compromise, and observers predicted that the Nov. 4 elections would grease the skids for a quick reopening of the government.
Just the opposite happened.
After Tuesday’s blue wave, Democrats feel they have the political winds at their backs, which has empowered them to dig in on their demand that health care subsidies be a part of any deal to end the shutdown.
Congressional Republicans are digging in, as well, insisting they won’t negotiate over health care, or anything else, until the government is reopened.
And President Trump hasn’t helped bridge the gap. Since the elections, he’s continued to reject the Democrats’ entreaties to launch bipartisan talks, instead urging GOP senators to end the shutdown through the strictly partisan maneuver of eliminating the Senate filibuster — an idea that even most Republicans in the Capitol oppose.
The combination has heightened tensions between Republicans and Democrats, who are as far apart as they’ve been at any point during the shutdown, and muddled the path to an eventual resolution. Indeed, by the end of last week, the nascent Senate deal that had been under discussion just days earlier had collapsed.
That breakdown became evident after a Senate Democratic lunch on Thursday, when even the centrist Democrats involved in the talks signaled they were a long way from a deal. GOP leaders wasted no time pointing fingers at liberal Democrats for leaning on Tuesday’s election results to pressure their moderate colleagues to abandon the emerging bipartisan agreement.
“AlI I know is that the pep rally they had a lunch yesterday evidently changed some minds,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (D-S.D.) told reporters Friday in the Capitol. “I thought we were on a track. We had given them everything they wanted — or had asked for — and at some point … they have to take yes for an answer.
“They were trending in that direction, and then yesterday, the wheels came off, so to speak,” Thune added. “We are ready to engage when they are.”
Heading into the Nov. 4 elections, many lawmakers and other political experts had predicted that the results would help to thaw the stubborn partisan deadlock and convince one side or the other to soften their demands to help end the shutdown, which entered its 40th day on Sunday.
“The election will give somebody some leverage,” one Democratic strategist said several days before voters went to the polls. “It all changes — your sense of, ‘How much am I going to resist?’ will change on Tuesday.”
It hasn’t played out that way.
While the results heavily favored the Democrats — and some had forecast that a blue wave would give Democrats the political space to reopen the government and move to health care later — the resounding victories only emboldened party leaders to double down on their demands.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) summed up those sentiments a day after the elections, saying the results were “a decisive repudiation of Donald Trump and failed Republican policies” — one that would only encourage Democrats to stick to their guns.
“Our position as House Democrats — working closely with our friends and colleagues on the other side of the Capitol, Senate Democrats — remains the same,” Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol.
A day later, Senate Democrats hosted their lunch, which seemed to unite the party behind the strategy of insisting on an ObamaCare fix as part of any deal to reopen the government. And on Friday, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) took that a step further by proposing, for the first time, a series of specific provisions Democrats want to see as part of any agreement, including a one-year extension of the expiring Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies.
“Democrats have said we must address the health care crisis, but Republicans have repeatedly said they won’t negotiate to lower the health care costs until the government reopens,” Schumer said on the chamber floor. “So let’s find a path to honor both positions.”
The one-year window for ACA subsidies was a concession from Democrats, who have previously insisted that the extension be permanent. Even so, Republicans wasted no time rejecting Schumer’s proposal out of hand, revealing that their election losses last week have done little to soften their own demand that the government be reopened before health care talks begin.
“Everybody who follows this knows that’s a nonstarter,” Thune said Friday after Schumer’s speech. “There is no way. The ObamaCare extension is the negotiation. That’s what we’re going to negotiate once the government opens up.”
Democrats, though, aren’t budging either. “The Democrats’ position is unchanged,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), the head of the House Democratic Caucus told reporters last week.
And the elections have given them new fuel — and new pressure from their liberal base — to stay that course.
While the president’s party has historically fared poorly in off-year elections following a presidential contest — and Democrats were forecast to prevail in the major contests in Virginia, New Jersey and California — they were not expected to win them by the large margins that they did.
In Virginia, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) won the governor’s race by 15 points. In New Jersey, current Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) sailed to victory by 13 points. And Californians voted overwhelmingly to redraw the Golden State’s House map to secure more Democratic seats — a direct response to Trump’s redistricting campaign in a number of Republican-led states.
GOP leaders downplayed the results, saying they have no bearing on what might happen in next year’s midterm elections, when the House is up for grabs.
“What happened last night was blue states and blue cities voted blue,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said the morning afterwards. “We all saw that coming.”
Democrats have insisted all along that GOP leaders sit down and discuss a budget compromise, to include an effort to prevent enhanced ObamaCare subsidies from expiring at the end of the year.
The calls for new talks have been rejected by Thune, Trump and Johnson, who say they have nothing to negotiate, since their stopgap proposal to reopen the government is a “clean” bill that keeps spending at current levels. Last week, Schumer and Jeffries wrote to Trump asking for another meeting. It went ignored.
Yet if history is any predictor, Trump’s involvement will be critical if the sides hope to reach an agreement. That was the case during the shutdown in 2019, under Trump’s first term, and a growing number of lawmakers — even on the Republican side — say it’ll be true in this budget fight, as well.
“He needs to get off the sidelines and get in the game. Because until he does, this government will remain shut down,” Jeffries told reporters on Thursday in the Capitol. “Mike Johnson and John Thune have zero authority to act on their own.”
