USA TODAY, WASHINGTON – The ongoing government shutdown is about to become the longest in United States history, even as millions of Americans feel the increasingly painful consequences of the crisis on their daily lives.
The record will likely be surpassed after senators take their 14th vote on a short-term funding measure on Tuesday, barring any sudden changes on Capitol Hill.
“I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think any of us expected that it would drag on this long,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, said at his daily briefing. “We couldn’t have imagined it’s now tied with the longest shutdown in history.”
Though lawmakers have said in recent days that bipartisan negotiations are gaining steam, no deal has emerged yet to reopen the federal government. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, told reporters Monday he’s “optimistic” that the government shutdown could come to an end this week and that lawmakers are “getting close to an off-ramp.”
“The objective here is to try and get something that we could send back to the House that would open up the government,” he said, according to reports.
Also on Monday, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers released a tentative framework for a potential deal that would extend expiring the health insurance subsidies that have been at the center of the shutdown debate. The legislation would extend the tax credits, which will sunset at the end of the year, for two years and include guardrails to prevent fraud. It’s not clear, however, that the Senate would support the bill.
No major agreement is expected Tuesday, especially while Washington turns its attention to a series of much-anticipated off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey, New York and a major ballot initiative in California. Congressional Republicans have marked the contests as a potential turning point in their opponents’ shutdown posture, though Democrats have refuted that notion.
Still, the outcome of Tuesday’s shutdown vote in Congress will prove to be a meaningful gauge of just how far apart Republicans and Democrats remain, especially amid widespread questions about whether the more than 40 million Americans reliant on food assistance could starve this month. Following a judge’s order, the Trump administration said Monday that it would send out only partial payments to beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Trump on Tuesday morning appeared to reject that plan.
