As the shutdown drags on, the partisan barbs keep flying on Capitol Hill. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday laid the blame for the continued impasse squarely on Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
“It takes two sides to negotiate, and Republicans — particularly Speaker Johnson, who seems to be the nub of the crisis — still haven’t come to the table in a serious way,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “Speaker Johnson, perhaps more than anyone else, has dug in and shut the door to any cooperation. Speaker Johnson has become a massive roadblock to progress. Yesterday, he even said that there’s nothing to negotiate on the shutdown and has sent the House home for yet another week. The House hasn’t held a vote now for 18 days. They haven't been in session for two weeks. That proves beyond a doubt that Speaker Johnson is causing — and not interested in ending — the shutdown. Clearly, at this point, he is the main obstacle.”
The Senate’s top Democrat also said that Trump isn’t taking the shutdown seriously and that the president will have to get involved for progress to be made. “Ending this shutdown will require Donald Trump to step in and push Speaker Johnson to negotiate,” Schumer said. “Because without the president’s involvement, Speaker Johnson and MAGA Republicans in the House are increasingly dug in.”
Schumer claimed that Johnson is obstructing progress for political reasons, including avoiding a vote to release the files in the case of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “He cares more about protecting the Epstein files than protecting the American people from the healthcare crisis,” Schumer said. “But also, he has a very big problem: House Republicans, his own caucus, are bitterly divided on healthcare.”
MTG goes rogue: Schumer then pointed to GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump ally, who broke with GOP leaders in a post on X Monday evening in which she called for extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits at the heart of the shutdown fight.
“I’m absolutely disgusted that health insurance premiums will DOUBLE if the tax credits expire this year,” the Georgia congresswoman wrote. “Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!”
For his part, Johnson dismissed Greene’s criticism, saying she was not in the loop on GOP plans regarding the expiring ACA tax credits. “Congresswoman Greene does not serve on the committees of jurisdiction to deal with those specialized issues, and she’s probably not read in on some of that, because it’s still been sort of in their silos of the people who specialize in those issues,” Johnson told reporters.
The speaker also slammed Schumer and again pointed to the senator’s past warnings about the harm of a shutdown. He also criticized Schumer’s negotiating history, saying that Schumer had put a partisan poison pill into a previous bill they were negotiating. “So now he wants me to be a fair broker,” Johnson said. “I have been. I gave him much more grace than he ever deserved.”
No Senate votes on funding bills: Senate Republicans had initially planned to hold a sixth round of votes on a pair of competing bills to fund the government. Those plans got scrapped and the Senate instead took up a slew of the president’s nominations, confirming 107 as a group in a party-line vote.