The Senate on Thursday rejected dueling stopgap bills to fund the government for the seventh time as Republicans slammed Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer for saying every day of the shutdown “gets better” for Democrats.
Thursday was the ninth day of the shutdown, with no sign of it ending.
Mr. Schumer and his caucus are dug in against reopening the government unless Republicans negotiate with them to lower health care costs. The New York Democrat believes his party is winning the shutdown messaging war, but in celebrating that, he ironically made a misstep for Republicans to exploit.
“Every day gets better for us,” Mr. Schumer told Punchbowl News.
Republicans have seized on that quote as evidence Mr. Schumer is interested only in political games and not worried about the shutdown’s harmful impact on Americans who rely on shuttered government services, as well as its effect on military troops and other federal workers who are not getting paid.
“The leader of the Democrat Party is bragging about the cost that is being borne by the American people,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said, calling Mr. Schumer’s comment “despicable.”
Fellow Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, added, “If you’re Chuck Schumer and a good day for you is defined by how much suffering you can impose on other people, including our men and women in uniform, maybe you need to look in the mirror and check yourself at the door and wonder what it is you’re up here trying to accomplish.”
Mr. Schumer’s full comments to Punchbowl were about the messaging and policy fight behind the shutdown, not its impact.
“It’s because we’ve thought about this long in advance and we knew that health care would be the focal point on Sept. 30 and we prepared for it,” he said, adding that Republicans’ “whole theory was — threaten us, bamboozle us and we would submit in a day or two.”
Punchbowl said Mr. Schumer acknowledged the pain of the shutdown and said Democrats knew their messaging on it would be and is “a hard fight.”
“But every day we’re getting better and better as the message sinks in more and more deeply,” Mr. Schumer said.
To that end, Mr. Schumer has held Senate Democrats mostly together in filibustering the House-passed stopgap bill to fund the government through Nov. 21 as they demand a bipartisan negotiation on health care.
The seventh vote on the measure Thursday again fell short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster, 54-45.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman is the only Democrat who has voted for the GOP stopgap on all seven votes since Sept. 19.
Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto, Nevada Democrat, and Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats, have supported it on the five votes since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.
No other Democrats have broken from the party line, even as Republicans insist the only way to reopen the government is for five more Democrats to do so. The GOP stopgap bill, called a continuing resolution or CR, would re-up the previous fiscal year spending levels and policies through Nov. 21.
“If Democrats would only agree, we could reopen the government in just a few hours,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, said. “Pay our troops, pay federal workers and stop this madness — and this notion that somehow, in this political game, the Democrats believe, according to their leader, that ‘every day gets better for us,’ that is not the experience of the American people.”
The Senate has also rejected Democrats’ counterproposal seven times, including a 47-50 vote on Thursday. The Democratic CR would run through Oct. 31 and add $1.5 trillion in health care and other spending.
Democrats’ top demand is to extend a COVID-era expansion of Obamacare subsidies set to expire this year. The enhanced subsidies cap out-of-pocket premiums at 8.5% of household income.
“Each day, our case to fix health care and end the shutdown gets better and better, stronger and stronger, because families are opening their letters showing how high their premiums will climb if Republicans get their way,” Mr. Schumer said in floor remarks Thursday. “They’re seeing why this fight matters — it’s about protecting their health care, their bank accounts, their futures.”
Mr. Schumer said President Trump and GOP leaders are “playing with people’s lives” by not negotiating and threatening mass layoffs of federal workers.
“Workers are starting to miss out on paychecks. Seniors are worried about delays at the Social Security Administration. Small businesses with government contracts are in the dark,” he said. “We need to end this shutdown as soon as possible.”
• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.