If the Senate reached a boiling point on Wednesday about the government shutdown because of the fight about stopping families from losing food aid, there finally seemed to be some progress a day later.
On Thursday, Democrats seemed to be willing to talk with Republicans.
“I would say that both sides need to think very hard about the American people,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) told The Independent.
Democrats still want to get some kind of ironclad agreement that Speaker Mike Johnson’s House of Representatives will hold a vote to extend the enhanced tax credits for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace.
And Senate Republicans cannot guarantee that could happen.
“You can’t guarantee a presidential veto,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told The Independent. “What you can do is guarantee there's a fair number of Republicans that are willing to work with them on it.”
Johnson has kept the House out of session for more than a month now, arguing that the House did its job when it passed a “clean” resolution to keep the government open without an extension of the subsidies. That has frustrated even some Republicans in the House like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
“It makes no sense to only go a couple of weeks,” Tillis said. “They always have the option of going back to this if they prove us wrong, and we're not prepared to work in good faith and have the administration support an outcome on the Obamacare subsidies.”
But Democrats have said that they are frustrated that Johnson’s keeping the House out of session precludes them from getting any work done.
“I think the fact that the House has disappeared for the last five weeks is going to be something that the American people are very unlikely to forget,” Bennet said. “I mean that the complete abandonment of their responsibility has been shocking. At least the people in the Senate have been coming here every week to see if we can get to a resolution.”
In addition, many Democrats say that the only way to end the shutdown is to get President Donald Trump, who visited Asia this week, to lead negotiations.
“They're not going to move until Trump tells them to move,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told reporters. “So until you hear something real from Donald Trump, it doesn't feel like anything is real.”
Murphy also said that he wants commitments for guardrails to prevent Trump from violating the law.
“You know, a vote doesn't help the people in my state, a vote that is designed to fail is just a guarantee that millions of people lose health care in this country,” he said. “I'm not interested in Republican platitudes about free speech. I want provisions in the budget that constrain Donald Trump's illegality.”
But Republicans say that there is no reason to bring the president into talks.
“I don’t expect the president to negotiate yet,” Tillis said. “ I mean, we've made it very clear that they need to get out of the shutdown posture before it elevates to the White House being involved in negotiation. So I don't think his absence has affected the negotiations one iota.”
So far, Trump has closed the door to negotiating with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
And Republicans tend to agree.
“This hasn’t anything to do with President Trump,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) told The Independent. “ It's all leverage for them because they don't like what President Trump is doing, and they know their base will kill them if they don't keep fighting.”
Mullin and other Republicans speculated that Democrats would finally relent after next week’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia, something Democrats scoffed at.
“They’ve been predicting we would fold, and we would be predicting they would find a backbone,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told The Independent. Sen Brian Schatz of Hawaii was even more dismissive
“Republicans are saying a lot of things,” he told The Independent as he jumped into an elevator with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), which caused them both to laugh.
