Welcome to shutdown week.
Federal agencies will run out of money at midnight on Tuesday. And there’s no resolution to the crisis anywhere in sight.
For the first time since taking office in January, President Donald Trump will meet with the Big Four congressional leaders at 3 p.m. today at the White House.
It’ll also be the first time that Trump has ever sat down with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries has routinely called Trump a “conman.” And Jeffries leads a caucus that has absolutely no patience for Trump or interest in helping him — to say the least.
Personal feelings aside, Republicans and Democrats aren’t close to being on the same page when it comes to averting a shutdown. Republicans want a clean CR running through Nov. 21. Democrats continue to dig in deep for an extension of enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies, restricting Trump’s ability to rescind spending and rolling back Medicaid cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
During a virtual Senate Democratic Caucus meeting on Sunday, there was no noticeable shift in Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s strategy, according to two senators on the call. It wasn’t contentious, added another senator, signaling that Democrats remain willing — at least for now — to shut down the government to get what they want.
We want to run down a number of the dynamics we’ll be watching as the week unfolds.
The meeting. Today’s White House meeting is both a big moment and — more likely than not — a waste of time. Trump already canceled a bipartisan meeting after Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune lobbied him against it. That was a poor decision that gave Democrats a good talking point.
On Friday, Schumer asked Thune to request a meeting with Trump, which is how today’s gathering will take place.
GOP leaders and the White House feel as if they have the upper hand heading into this shutdown showdown and want to force Schumer and Jeffries to cave and back the GOP’s “clean” stopgap funding bill.
Thune said on Sunday that “fundamentally, nothing has changed,” and that the only choice for Democrats is the House-passed CR or a “completely avoidable shutdown that prioritizes politics above all else.”
“Hopefully Sen. Schumer sees the light and listens to the same voice that walked him and his colleagues away from the edge of a shutdown in March,” Thune said. “If a White House meeting helps him get there, I welcome the opportunity.”
Yet what Republicans don’t seem to grasp at this point is that Democrats have no incentive to cave. Thune must turn to Democrats in order to get 60 votes in the Senate for any funding bill. Jeffries wanted this fight in March, when Schumer blinked. And Schumer is under tremendous external pressure to hold firm even if that leads to a shutdown. His only play at this point is to paint Republicans as unreasonable over their refusal to negotiate.
Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other top White House officials have pushed hard on the line that Democrats are looking to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on health care for undocumented immigrants. This has become the White House’s main talking point as Democrats seek to roll back the Medicaid provisions in the OBBB.
Yet what Democrats don’t want to admit is that their chief ask — extending enhanced premium subsidies for Obamacare — has limited support in the House and Senate Republican conferences.
Sure, there are Republican moderates in both chambers who’d like to extend the tax credits. But neither House nor Senate GOP leaders, nor their committee chairs, really want this. Just listen to how Thune talks about the credits on “Meet the Press” Sunday: He said they are “fraught with waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Not to mention that hardline conservatives — think Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) — want to sunset these credits forever.
What Schumer and Jeffries are banking on is getting to the negotiating table with Trump and seeing what happens. The president hasn’t been terribly dialed into this debate. Trump has said he can’t get a deal because Democrats want to re-open the southern border to millions of undocumented migrants. This is false.
Some Democrats think they should relent and let Republicans own the health care mess.
Trump is unpredictable in these situations. Yet he’s also heavily influenced by Johnson and Thune, both of whom have come through for him during this Congress.
That said, we’ve sensed some nervousness inside the Trump administration over the looming health care cliff, which could see millions of Americans forced to cover soaring premiums payments. Which means we can see Trump wanting to solve the problem, but maybe not on the seven-week CR.
Trump has a bully pulpit unlike anyone on Capitol Hill. And if he sticks to the script, Trump can make a shutdown very painful for Democrats. Trump and OMB Director Russ Vought have threatened mass layoffs of federal workers if there’s a shutdown. That’s aimed directly at Schumer and Jeffries.
Vought also has enormous sway over what agencies are deemed “essential” and must stay open even as hundreds of thousands of federal workers, plus military service members, aren’t being paid.
All Johnson and Thune have to do here is keep Trump in line. Republicans have passed a clean CR – and nearly every GOP lawmaker is comfortable with that position.
We’ve been critical of Johnson’s decision to keep the House out for the week. The House Republican leadership’s view is that it’s unwise to have lawmakers in D.C. with nothing to do on the floor.
But House Democrats are back in town beginning today. They have a caucus meeting tonight. Republicans will be yielding the stage — and the cameras — to Democrats for the week. Democrats are hoping to make the GOP pay for this.
Johnson and the House Republican leadership will revisit bringing the House back after their 11 a.m. conference call today.
