It’s Day 29 of the shutdown. There’s no resolution in sight to this crisis.
The House has now been out of session for 40 days.
House Minority Whip Katherine Clark will be our guest on Fly Out Day tomorrow. Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Breaking news: Brett Horton, longtime chief of staff to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, will leave Capitol Hill in December, a seismic departure at the top rung of the House Republican leadership.
Horton is one of the longest-serving leadership staffers and one of the primary architects of Scalise’s career.
Horton will join the American Hotel & Lodging Association as chief advocacy officer, where he will oversee lobbying, advocacy and political activities.
The Louisiana native joined Scalise’s rank-and-file operation in 2010 as a legislative counsel. Horton helped steer Scalise’s career from the chairmanship of the Republican Study Committee to a surprise yet overwhelming victory over former Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) for the GOP whip job in 2014.
This move eventually helped catapult Scalise to the No. 2 slot in the House Republican leadership. Horton has been Scalise’s chief for nearly 10 years.
Horton has been by Scalise’s side during an attempted assassination, bouts with cancer and a failed run for speaker of the House in the wake of conservative hardliners overthrowing former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
In GOP leadership circles, Horton is known for his encyclopedic expertise on the House Republican Conference and his extraordinarily close relationship with Scalise. Horton was deciding between multiple offers downtown after his search.
Horton’s departure will raise a question that makes Scalise’s orbit extremely uncomfortable: Will the No. 2 House Republican call it quits? During the last few months, Scalise’s communications director and two deputy chiefs of staff both left for the private sector. Scalise, who came to D.C. in 2008, is the longest-serving member of the leadership.
Scalise told us on Fly Out Day two weeks ago that he’s going to run for reelection.
“I’m enjoying this,” Scalise said.
Day 29. At some point, the government shutdown is going to end. Maybe. Somehow. We hope.
But the fight has placed health care at the center of the national political debate, and that’s already proving to be a messy topic for the GOP.
There are some Republicans who want to extend the expiring Obamacare subsidies as is or with minor changes. These moderate Republicans are awfully quiet nowadays.
There are others — such as Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson — who say they’re open to broader conversations about health-care reform but really don’t want to extend the ACA subsidies.
Then there are GOP lawmakers like Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) urging President Donald Trump to scrap the subsidies altogether, a direct challenge to the Affordable Care Act. These Republicans argue the need for subsidies in the first place shows that Obamacare has failed in its stated goal of keeping health-care costs down.
“If you’re going to support anybody with a subsidy, then you should give it to them in cash and let them be a health care buyer,” said Scott, who was part of a closed-door meeting with Thune on the issue last week.
Scott was alluding to the fact that the Obamacare enhanced tax credits — the issue behind this shutdown — go to insurance companies, who then lower enrollees’ premium payments to reflect the subsidy. This is a favorite GOP argument against the credits.
During last week’s meeting, Scott and other conservatives pitched Thune on using the reconciliation process to craft a new health care law, arguing Democrats have shown they won’t actually negotiate a bipartisan deal. Senate GOP leaders have, in general, been cool to a second reconciliation bill.
“They keep wanting to defend Obamacare,” Scott said of Democrats. “Obamacare needs to just be fixed.”
The reconciliation question underscores just how significant Republicans’ process disagreements are in addition to their differing policy views.
Other key GOP lawmakers have been pushing for a bipartisan health care package to pass by the end of the year, though that would involve narrower and more universally-backed changes like pharmacy benefit manager crackdowns.
But what some Republicans are now envisioning could be much broader.
Danger, danger. The problem for Republicans is they’ve got a bunch of different views and little time. The midterms are just one year away. And the idea of muscling through another large-scale reconciliation bill, especially with conservatives eager for more spending cuts, seems far fetched. A health care bill would be politically and substantively complex.
Just watch Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) response to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins when she asks him if Republicans have a health-care plan. Moreno named a few policies and said it would take months for Republicans to coalesce around a set of policies. That’s just on their side.
And who knows what the political landscape will look like after the shutdown? Will the mood on Capitol Hill be so toxic that Democrats can’t work with any Republicans on any issue or vice versa? This is a historically bitter standoff that will be difficult to move past. Plus, don’t rule out another shutdown over FY2026 funding levels.
Some proponents believe it could be difficult at this point to introduce big changes to the enhanced Obamacare subsidies for 2026, which is the bare minimum for many Republicans to consider the idea. This is the Democrats’ top ask. And open enrollment begins Saturday, with premium costs predicted to soar.
“We need to eliminate the Covid-era subsidies,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said. “We just can’t do it immediately. It’s too late into the cycle. I hope that people coalesce around maybe a one-year extension and then year two ramp down.”
The back-and-forth all underscores the challenge for Republicans politically. Democrats are eager to spotlight health care costs and believe it’s an issue they can win on politically. The GOP leadership is biting, saying they want to do something. But a Republican health care overhaul is far easier said than done.
