WASHINGTON — Democrats are still casting about for a plan on how to avoid a potential government shutdown later this month, but some key senators are already naming a price President Donald Trump must pay in return for their vote to avert a shutdown — and it centers on the cost of health care.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Democrats should demand Republicans undo recent Medicaid cuts and prevent a coming lapse of tax credits for buying health insurance.
“The Republicans have put in place a storm that’s about to overtake American families: Fifteen million Americans will lose their health care coverage, and millions more will see the costs go up for their private insurance, and rural hospitals will close,” the progressive senator told HuffPost. “Democrats are out here fighting to try to get more health care coverage for Americans, and this is the moment to fight for it.”
And she’s not the only one. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a freshman centrist, said Trump should reverse his Medicaid cuts as well as agree to extend the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits that are due to expire this year. She also wants the Trump administration to release billions of dollars in funding they have frozen for critical health research.
“If the president wants my vote, he has to negotiate. One place to start is to walk back cuts to health care,” Slotkin said in a video posted online.
Although Republicans control both chambers of Congress, Democratic votes will be needed to pass legislation to avoid a shutdown in the Senate, where 60 votes are required to end debate. That gives Democrats critical leverage — leverage they gave away back in March, causing huge intraparty backlash — to try and roll back some of Trump’s policies and attacks on the rule of law.
The backlash unleashed a wave of anger at Democratic leadership, something the party’s establishment would prefer to avoid repeating. But for now, party leaders are keeping their cards close to their chests. Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) reminded Republicans this week that any deal to fund the government will require bipartisan support, though he, too, signaled that rising costs would be at the top of his party’s agenda.
“We will not enable Republicans’ carnage of this country. We won’t bail Republicans out as the cost of health care, groceries, school supplies, rent, electricity all go up and up and up,” Schumer said Monday. “We still have some time to avoid that dismal outcome. We Democrats don’t want to see a government shutdown. But avoiding one means Republicans have to show they are serious about having a real, substantive, serious negotiation.”
Linking health care costs to the shutdown would keep the argument on terrain friendly to Democrats, since the cost of health care generally polls as one of their strongest issues. But some critics have argued Democrats would be solving the GOP’s problem for them by helping Republicans avoid politically poisonous price hikes.
Republicans also haven’t coalesced around a strategy to keep the government open past the Sept. 30 deadline. Some GOP lawmakers prefer a short-term bill, perhaps for a few months, which would give Congress more time to hammer out a broader agreement. Others want a longer, so-called “continuing resolution” to stretch well into next year. The White House, meanwhile, has indicated a preference for a bill funding the government until Jan. 31.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday Republicans were negotiating on legislation that would fund a handful of agencies while putting the rest on temporary autopilot to give appropriators more time to finalize details. He said the House and Senate should compromise on a final product and that any shutdown would be Democrats’ fault.
“As we get closer to the funding deadline, we recognize the shutdown chatter from the left grows louder,” Johnson said Tuesday. “Some of these people seem to enjoy this. It seems Democrats may take the path of maximum resistance.”
If the House can pass a bill to keep the government running at mostly current levels — with as few “poison pill” provisions as possible — that would once again set up a major test for Senate Democrats. The party is facing calls from progressives to get more aggressive in fighting against Trump’s administration, including by refusing to fund the government. But there is still a group of Democratic senators who are uncomfortable with the idea of shouldering blame for a shutdown, which would negatively affect many federal workers and keep them off the job.
“It was wrong for the Republicans to do it. It’s wrong for us to do it, too,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), one of 10 Senate Democrats who voted in March to avert a shutdown, told HuffPost when asked about the latest spending clash. “Millions of people depend on that, and there’s a lot of workers who won’t get paid, and they won’t get that back.”
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), another Democrat who voted to advance a GOP funding bill in March, said he believed the calculus on government funding for Democrats is different this time.
“People of the country are looking at what he’s doing a lot differently than they did back then,” he said of Trump. But when asked if he would accept another similar GOP funding bill again, he demurred. “We’re having a number of discussions about a variety of things. We’re taking one day at a time right now.”
Some Republicans have also acknowledged that not extending the expiring ACA tax credits would hurt their party electorally, particularly with the midterm elections looming next year. That could involve a deal on some sort of extension that includes lowering income threshold requirements.
“It’s bad policy and bad politics to let them lapse,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a critic of the GOP’s cuts to Medicaid who is retiring next year, told reporters on Tuesday.
Other Democrats believe their party should take more drastic measures given that Trump is seizing an alarming amount of power from Congress and the courts, laying waste to the federal government and intimidating institutions large and small — all without any checks and balances.
“It’s a pretty simple question: why should Congress continue to fund Trump’s totalitarian seizure of power if the budget has no meaningful new checks on his corruption?” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) asked in a post online.
In an interview with HuffPost, Murphy argued that the Trump administration shouldn’t be trusted to follow through on any spending bill passed by this Congress.
“A [continuing resolution] isn’t worth the paper it’s written on if the president is going to act illegally and refuse to spend the money that’s in it,” Murphy said. “The premiums are also going to start going up … that doesn’t stop the fact that people are going to be getting nightmarish increases in their premiums. So we don’t have time to wait here. We have to act with some urgency here.”
Outside of Congress, the progressive group Indivisible has lamented Democrats’ seeming refusal to articulate clear demands, and influential progressive columnist Ezra Klein has offered a similar critique, suggesting a shutdown might be better than “complicity” in Trump’s governance.
So far, elected Democrats are trying to present a united front. Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the group hadn’t taken a specific position on government funding, adding that Democrats were on the same page.
“The CPC is united with House Democrats in making it clear that we won’t support Trump partisan attacks on people’s health care,” Casar told HuffPost.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said Democrats had unrealistic expectations in March when they balked at Republicans’ government funding bill, and that the same thing could happen again.
“They want a different president, they want a different majority leader, and they want a different speaker. They don’t have any of those things. So I know what they want, and they have to adjust their expectations accordingly,” Cole told HuffPost.
One reason Democrats angered their base by agreeing to fund the government in March is due to their failure to manage expectations. Schumer initially said Democrats would filibuster a GOP funding bill before reversing course and caving a day later. The bungled handling of the fight prompted a wave of anger among Democratic voters that Schumer has yet to fully recover from.
But Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), the likely Democratic whip after Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) steps down next year, also voted to keep government open in March and argued that his party is more aligned and has a better strategy going into this spending fight.
“I think we’ve been clearer and been more communicative, both internally and externally,” Schatz said. “We’re a little bit more on our front foot, they’re a little bit more on their back foot, and we’re clear that we’re not going to get jammed.”