A Republican bill to end the government shutdown failed in the Senate for the 10th time Thursday, leaving lawmakers in a deadlock as the lapse in federal funding stretched into its third week.
The resolution fell short in a 51-45 vote that fell mostly along party lines. Sixty senators are needed to pass any interim bill; Republicans have a slim majority of 53 seats in the Senate.
Earlier on Thursday, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly called on President Donald Trump to get involved in negotiations between Republican and Democratic senators to break the impasse.
“I think we need the president to make that happen, that he needs to engage with Mike Johnson and John Thune,” Kelly said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” referring to the Republicans who are the House majority whip and Senate leader, respectively.
“They seem to follow suit on everything. That’s how this ends,” the Arizona senator said.
The sticking point in passing a funding deal is that Democrats insist that any such bill extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of 2025.
A Democratic bill to maintain those additional subsidies, which about 22 million Americans use to reduce the cost of their Obamacare health plans, is expected to cost nearly $1.5 trillion over a decade.
“The president has talked about how he wants this fixed. He wants these subsidies fixed,” Kelly said.
“So he agrees that we should open the government and fix the subsidy problem under the Affordable Care Act, and that’s all we want,” Kelly said. “So I don’t see what the problem is.”
Thune and other Republicans have said they would be willing to discuss whether the ACA’s enhanced tax credits should be extended after a short-term funding extension is approved.
In an interview Thursday with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Thune said, “We’re happy to sit down and talk about a solution to the ACA, the tax credits, but that has to happen in a separate context, you know, away from having open government.”
Johnson, in an interview on “Squawk Box” on Thursday, said: “This is not a fight for health care. It’s a very simple fight for funding. It always was.”
“They’ve created a red herring. The subsidies don’t expire until the end of the year,” Johnson said.
“We were always planning to have a thoughtful debate and deliberation about that in the month of October and November, before the subsidies expired. They know that. They took that end-of-year issue and delayed it until September to try to pretend that was the problem. It never was,” Johnson said.
The speaker also said that “major reform is needed” with the ACA subsidies, “if they are really going to be extended.”
Punchbowl News reported Thursday that “there is a bipartisan group of senators discussing several possible ways out” of the shutdown impasse “that involve increased Obamacare subsidies.”
“The group, led in part by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), is discussing the possibility of holding two parallel votes aimed at ending the shutdown,” Punchbowl reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
“The first vote would be on reopening the government, while the second would be on a one-year extension of Obamacare’s enhanced premium tax credits, plus a commitment to pass a longer-term solution by a certain date.”
