WASHINGTON, D.C. – Despite some signs of hope, as of Exchange Monitor ‘s Friday deadline, there is not a vote scheduled in the Senate to reopen the government.
That is despite a Republican senator’s confidence that would happen.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told a quorum of reporters in the halls of the Capitol Tuesday he’s “pretty confident” Congress will reopen the government within days. He added while he was making “assumptions,” he expected the vote would happen by Friday.
The good news is that there appears to finally be movement toward a deal to reopen the government, Fox News reported early Friday morning.
As of Friday, the government has been shut down for 38 days, breaking the record for the longest shutdown since the 35-day shutdown in late 2018 and early 2019. As of now, five more Democrats need to vote “yes” on a stopgap bill, or continuing resolution (CR), that will recirculate money through the government agencies and reopen the government through Nov. 21, according to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) in a Capitol press conference Tuesday.
If the Senate acts Friday, assuming the date of the CR is extended past Nov. 21, the House will return as soon as Sunday, since the House will get 48 hours notice to return to Washington. According to Politico, Thune said in a private lunch a vote would happen Friday, but Democratic senators apparently came out of their own private lunch ready to seek a better deal and block the CR again. Additionally, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said the Senate would be in through the weekend.
With the elections that occurred Tuesday in several states and New York City, the Oklahoma Republican suspects Democrats will be encouraged by their leaders to go ahead and vote to reopen the government afterward, Mullin added. However, that has not happened yet.
“Obviously we’re going to have to change the CR,” Mullin said when asked if he wanted to see the stopgap spending bill go through January, since Nov. 21 is now less than a few weeks away. “I would love to see us attach some appropriations bills on it, especially defense.”
As a result of the shutdown, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) furloughed around 1,400 employees, 80% of its workforce, with only 375 exempted as critical personnel to watch over the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. House Democrats bemoaned the furloughs, questioning their legal basis and alleging they were “politically motivated,” since NNSA employees had not been furloughed in past shutdowns including those under President Donald Trump, in a letter to the DOE and NNSA.
“You can’t make sense out of crazy, and that’s where Chuck Schumer [(D-N.Y.), Senate minority leader] has been this whole time,” Mullin said. “But I will tell you there’s enough Democrats that I’m friends with that were willing to vote last week.”
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group in the House, consisting of Reps. Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.), Don Bacon (R-Neb.), Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) released a “statement of principles” as a compromise to temporarily extend and reform the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, and its subsidies. This is one of the issues Democrats insist be on the table for ending the government shutdown, and could be a sign the “gridlocked” Congress, as the statement called it, is loosening up to reopen the government.
Mullin said appropriators have to “work and make sure something’s happened” if the date is changed to December, “but at the same time, if the votes aren’t there and we’ve got to move it to January, we’ve got to work with our counterparts in both chambers. It’s just that if we move to January, those individuals that are concerned about it, I want to hear their concerns and know that they’re going to work to try to get to ‘yes’ to support the appropriations process.”