Eight Senate Democrats broke ranks with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Sunday night, joining Republicans in a test vote to end the filibuster on the revised GOP spending package. The final margin was 60-40. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican to vote no.
Importantly, the measure omits the one-year extension of COVID-era Affordable Care Act premium subsidies that Schumer had demanded on Friday.
Republicans have instead pledged only to hold a future Senate vote on the subsidies, which are set to expire on December 31.
The procedural vote does not immediately reopen the government, but it clears the way for Senate debate on the bill. A second vote — likely within the next several days — would require only a simple majority of 51 votes for passage.
Once approved, the modified bill would move to the House for consideration.
Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pergram reported:
The revamped bill re-opens the government through at least January 30. That buys lawmakers time to work on individual spending bills. However, the package includes full spending bills until next fall for the Department of Agriculture, veterans, and military construction programs, plus Congress.
Among the Democrats crossing the aisle were Sens. Angus King (I-ME), John Fetterman (D-PA), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Jacky Rosen (D-NM), Tim Kaine (D-VA), and Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), as per Fox News.
Reports last week suggested that a small group of Democratic senators had been prepared to move toward ending the shutdown, but were persuaded by party leaders to hold off until after the election. With assistance from their communications team, the legacy media, Democrats managed to shift blame for the shutdown onto Republicans — a strategy that contributed to the party’s sweep of key races on Tuesday night.
So, why did eight Democrats defy party leadership and vote with Republicans on Sunday night? [In Durbin’s case, he was leadership.]
Perhaps they concluded that the escalating fallout from the shutdown — flight cancellations, a shortage of air traffic controllers, constituents missing SNAP payments, and federal employees, including military personnel, Capitol Police officers, and congressional aides, working without pay — had become too severe to justify holding the government hostage over an issue Republicans were unlikely to concede on.
Pergram noted that some Democrats secured “spending priorities important to them in the appropriations bills tacked on to the package.” He added that the “new funding deadline of January 30 gives lawmakers the chance to finish the other spending bills and get their big asks into those bills. So, it was a combination of things which altered the equation.”
Asked why he defected, Sen. King told Fox, “The question was, does the shutdown further the goal of achieving some needed support for the extension of the tax credits? Our judgment was that it will not. It would not produce that result. And the evidence for that is almost seven weeks of fruitless attempts to make that happen.”
In the video below, King said he voted yea for two reasons. He was eager to “resume vital services” for his constituents and because Democrats were promised a vote on the Affordable Care Act subsidies when the shutdown ends.
As expected, Schumer denounced the vote, saying that by rejecting his Friday proposal to fund the ACA subsidies for one year — after which a long-term solution could be negotiated once the government reopened — Republicans had “shown that they are against any health care reform.”
“This healthcare crisis is so severe, so urgent, so devastating for families back home that I cannot, in good faith, support this CR that fails to address the healthcare crisis,” he said.
Below, Schumer reacts to the vote on the Senate floor.
Ahead of the test vote — when it appeared likely that enough Democrats were prepared to break ranks for the measure to advance — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said, “If Democrats cave on this issue, what it will say to Donald Trump is that he has a green light to go forward toward authoritarianism. And I think that would be a tragedy for this country.”
Although Sunday night’s vote did not immediately end the shutdown, now in its 41st day, it represented the most tangible progress so far toward ending the impasse.
The mood among Republicans has shifted toward optimism.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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