The senators were giddy.
Because there was a sense of inevitability about the 5.30pm vote on the Republican funding Bill, there was a sense of pageantry too. First came the Democrat-tabled Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Bill, upon Reconstitution, which would facilitate an 11-hour amendment to the Republican measures on health care.
From the gallery we watched as the various senators entered from the wings in dribs and drabs, signalling their vote and disappearing again. Lindsay Graham came whistling through and offered a jaunty thumbs down to the Democratic proposal, laughing as he exited the chamber without pausing.
Chuck Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa and a fixture on the Hill for half a century, came in, voted against and then engaged in cordial conversation with Tim Kaine, the Virginia Democrat. Bernie Sanders came in, cast his vote and sat at his desk looking fed up. Corey Booker, the New York Democratic senator, accidentally signalled a No vote before he was informed that this was his party’s vote, causing him to hurriedly change to Yes.
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A stand-off that had started months ago was now coming down to a few hours during which both parties remained stuck to their position. At midnight, unless the Republicans could find seven Democrat senators to vote with them and reach a quota of 60, the government budget calendar would elapse, resulting in an instant shutdown across multiple departments.
An emergency meeting with Donald Trump on Monday had yielded nothing except a cartoon later posted by the president that sent up both the Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his House equivalent Hakeem Jeffries, who was depicted in a sombrero and moustache in the video. On Tuesday, Trump made it clear that a government shutdown was no skin off his nose.
“When you shut it down you have to do lay-offs so we’ll be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected and the Democrats are gonna be Democrats. The last thing we want to do is shut it down but a lot of good can come from shutdowns – we can get rid of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
The Democrat rationale for not co-operating with the Bill is that they cannot acquiesce to the sweeping changes to the Affordable Care Act, which, they argue, will cause sharp increases to the health insurance premiums of millions of Americans and remove an estimated 15 million people from heath care programmes entirely.
The Republican counterargument is that the curtailments they imposed on health benefits through the One Big Beautiful Bill act have already managed to remove some 2.3 million ineligible enrollees from the programme, and that they want to kick off undocumented people on medical aid.
“It’s a lie,” Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat senator, stated on Tuesday evening.
“Federal law is already perfectly clear – there is nobody here who is undocumented who has access to Medicaid or to affordable care act subsidies.”
Earlier that afternoon, Louisiana Republican senator John Kennedy had stood in the chamber and set out the essential argument that his party will advance in the coming weeks if the midnight shutdown took hold.
“You’d need an Excel spreadsheet to be able to follow their demands. When my friend Senator Schumer announced those demands I knew in a nano second that we were headed for a shutdown. I call it the socialist wing. Some less charitable call it the Loon Wing. They run the party. They try to out-weird each other. They hate Thomas Jefferson, they hate George Washington. They hate Abraham Lincoln. They hate Dr Seuss. They hate Mr Potato Head. They think our kids should be able to change gender back and forth at recess.”
The government would shut down, he ventured, because of the “the angry Gary Busey wing of the Democrat Party”.
When it came to the final attempt by the Republicans to pass their Bill, at around 6pm, the Senate floor was chatty. It’s easy to forget that many of these politicians have long been stars in their own firmament. At least ten have been on the Capitol, as either representatives or senators, for anything between 40 and 50 years.
It was plain to see from the balcony: individually, the collegiality remains. But as parties, the breakdown in trust is total. At the doorway to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office, which is located just steps away from where visitors gather for guided tours, a television screen had been erected to show, on repeat, instances of Senate minority leader Schumer warning against the perils of a government shutdown. Now, the veteran New York Democrat stood accused of running scared from the more extreme elements within his party.
“He has been there half my life,” Speaker Johnson said last night. “This is the first time ever he has wanted to shut it down and I’ll tell you why. Because Chuck Schumer is fighting for his political life. The last time he did the responsible thing, the far left came after him.”
Trump made it be known that he would be sitting up and watching on as the last hours ticked down before the midnight expiry. The government has shut down on 21 occasions over the past 50 years. Most of those closures were resolved within a few days but the longest, 35 days, occurred as recently as 2018.
As of Wednesday morning, an estimated 750,000 federal workers will be furloughed, without pay until the shutdown is resolved, with knock-on consequences ranging from national park staff to air-traffic control.
Three Democratic senators – Catherine Masto (Nevada), John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) and Angus King (Maine, an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats) – had broken ranks from Schumer and voted for the Republican Bill to avoid a shutdown. House majority leader John Thune intends repeatedly holding further votes in the coming days in the hope that more will follow suit.
As of midnight, nobody blinked.
“It is a very reckless decision which Chuck Schumer has made,” warned House Speaker Mike Johnson.
“The Democrats have taken the last vote and within the last few hours voted it down once again. They are throwing a fit. Charles Schumer has just given the White House unilateral authority to make those permanent decisions about programmes that should survive and should be eliminated.”
