He's floating a bill to keep the government open for a week, but Republicans and Democrats are already balking.
Just hours away from Monday’s midnight deadline, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell floated the idea of keeping the government open for a week to hash out a deal, according to several reports.
McConnell’s office said time could solve the problem.
“Despite the Democrats’ refusal to work with the House to solve the problem, Republicans are working to protect the troops, prevent a shutdown and find solutions to the difficulties caused by Senate Democrats’ delays,” a spokesman for McConnell, Don Stewart, told MSNBC when asked about the possibility of a temporary spending bill.
But unlike the last time McConnell stepped into a big spending fight — ultimately averting a government shutdown in 2011 — this time his move was swiftly rejected by some Democrats and Republicans.
“I’m not inclined to support that, no,” Congressman Tom Price of Georgia told reporters. “It doesn’t make any progress in the right direction.”
A Democratic Senate aide told MSNBC that it was a “nonstarter,” both because House Republicans would likely reject it, and because the current shutdown debate is already over a stopgap measure that would only fund the government for six weeks.
“It’s hard to see what would change a week from now,” a second Senate Democratic aide said.
If McConnell’s move doesn’t work, that could leave Reid and Boehner back to playing hot potato with bills to fund the government. Neither chamber wants to be holding the bag at midnight when the government runs out of money.
Monday afternoon the Senate voted to reject a House bill that funds the government for six weeks in exchange for keeping the government open. Reid will send back the same bill they sent before, which keeps the government open without touching Obamacare.
Republicans left a Monday meeting saying they would send another bill back to the Senate tonight. Rep. Darrell Issa said the bill would include a delay to a rule in the health care law that requires Americans to have insurance. It would also eliminate subsidies lawmakers receive to their health care coverage, a proposal first floated by Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana.
House Speaker John Boehner condemned the Senate for refusing to meet earlier than this afternoon: “The Senate decided not to work yesterday. If it’s such an emergency, where are they?”
“There is the thinking if you feed the beast they will be satisfied, but the opposite is true,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a member of the House Democratic leadership, told reporters at a breakfast Monday morning.
And no one on Capitol Hill seems to know what the endgame will be.
“I have no idea what will happen,” GOP Rep. Ted Poe of Texas said on Monday morning. ”There’s been no decisions made on what happens when we get the Senate’s version back.” Outside Washington, markets are already nervous that a shutdown is on the horizon, with the Dow Jones dropping triple digits on Monday morning.
Boehner could try to buy more time by putting forward a stopgap budget of a few days or a week without the Obamacare changes that his caucus is demanding. But that could trigger a revolt from the right flank that’s led the charge against the president health-care law, and House Democrats might not be willing to bail the GOP out.
One thing seems certain, though: Regardless of whether or not there is a government shutdown after midnight, enrollment in Obamacare’s health-care exchanges will begin tomorrow, putting the centerpiece of the law into effect.
When asked how House Republicans would deal with that reality, Poe demurred. “We’ll just have to deal with that when tomorrow comes,” he said.