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Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked a bill to end the government shutdown for a sixth time, as the funding lapse enters its second week with little headway made toward a resolution.
Senators voted 54-45 on the GOP’s “clean” stopgap spending package that would fund the government through late November. It needed 60 votes to advance.
Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Angus King (I-Maine) and John Fetterman (D-Pa.) voted with Republicans, but for a fifth time no other members of the Democratic caucus joined them.
King on Wednesday said he would keep voting for the GOP stopgap bill out of a fear of the power that the White House could exert in a shutdown.
“The power that the president and OMB and Vought and Miller are exercising under the shutdown is a real threat to our country so I’m going to continue try to end the shutdown,” he said.
“I’d very much like to get this ACA thing resolved, he added, referring to Democrats’ demand to extend expiring Affordable Care Act premium subsidies. “I think that’s important, I think it can be, I think it should be. Republicans should step up and help us do that. But in the end we gotta get this shutdown over because I think the worst is yet to come.”
Democrats have continued to press for talks to extend healthcare subsidies past the year-end deadline, but Republicans have rebuffed them, saying that those conversations can only take place when the government reopens.
“I know this story’s getting old. You’re trying to find new angles, but it’s the same [thing] — the conversation will happen when we open up the government,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) reiterated to reporters. “[N]othing’s changed.”
The vote came after yet another one on the Democratic continuing resolution that includes a permanent extension of the Affordable Care Act tax credits. That one also failed, 47 to 52, along party lines.
Meanwhile, Democrats continued to pin blame on the GOP for their inability refusal to work something out as part of this negotiation.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in his floor remarks. “The government is shut down for one reason and one reason only: Donald Trump and the Republicans would rather kick 15 million people off health insurance and raise premiums by thousands and thousands of dollars a year on tens of millions of Americans, rather than sit down and work with Democrats on fixing healthcare.”