The air is turning blue over the Capitol Dome. And the government is more shut than ever.
Washington woke Thursday to a whiff of rare hope that behind-the-scenes efforts were accelerating in the Senate to end a federal shutdown now imposing severe pain on millions of Americans.
But the day ended with senators skipping town for the weekend — to join members of the House not seen inside the Beltway for so long it’s hard to remember what they look like.
What’s so galling is that both Republicans and Democrats insist they are keeping faith with their duties — taking care of the American people — but that the other side is willing to drive ordinary citizens to the brink of hunger or sickness.
Senate Democrats triggered the shutdown, refusing to extend federal funding until Republicans agree to extend expiring enhanced Obamacare subsidies, without which millions of citizens will see the cost of health care rocket.
Republicans are willing to talk — but only when the government is opened again. Their assurances aren’t being taken at face value since their president routinely ignores the terms of deals and Congress’ constitutionally sound decisions on how to spend taxpayer money.
The result: Vital SNAP benefits that help feed more than 40 million people are within hours of running out. Federal workers deemed essential have slogged through demoralizing weeks without pay. And it’s no vacation for their furloughed colleagues either: Financial obligations aren’t shut down just because the government is.
Little is evident on the horizon that could prevent the monthlong shutdown from becoming the longest on record next week.
In the absence of meaningful progress, dismayed lawmakers spent the day venting and trading insults.
Democrats accused Republicans of starving kids. Vice President JD Vance accused Democrats of putting extreme pressure on air traffic controllers, implying they were risking the nation’s “extra safe” skies. And President Donald Trump — perhaps the sole agent with the capacity to change the political wind and end the shutdown — didn’t really say anything until a late-night post calling on GOP senators to abolish the filibuster to end the funding stalemate.
West Virginia Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis said staying in town over the weekend “is gonna be a waste of time.” Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, told CNN’s Dana Bash he was shocked “at the level of cruelty” shown by his GOP colleagues.
And renegade Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman has had it up to here with everyone. “It’s an absolute failure what occurred here for the last month,” Fetterman told CNN. He also complained about his own party’s tactics. “We can’t even get our sh*t together and just open up our government,” he said.
Democrats might have some justification in arguing that Republicans and their health care policies and endless attempts to kill Obamacare set the stage for this crisis. But Republicans can also point to the great contradiction of the Democratic strategy: The shutdown has now become a test of which bloc of unfortunate Americans are hurting the most — those who risk losing health care or those who don’t have enough to eat.
Shutdowns typically end when one party can’t bear the political price of the government staying closed. In many ways, these showdowns are Washington games that can define the course of presidencies and Congresses.
But the fact that it’s now been a month and neither side is willing to blink is also a symptom of a broken political system and a Congress that can no longer do its basic constitutional task of funding the government. And any victory for either party at this point will be hollow, since it will be built on the suffering of citizens.
One federal judge in Boston is doing what the judiciary often seems to do these days: stepping in where Congress has failed. US District Judge Indira Talwani signaled she will intervene in the dispute over the Trump administration’s refusal to use billions of dollars in emergency funds to fund food stamps under SNAP.
“Right now, Congress has put money in an emergency fund for an emergency, and it’s hard for me to understand how this isn’t an emergency when there’s no money and a lot of people are needing their SNAP benefits,” Talwani said in the kind of plain English that lawmakers seem to shed when they get to Washington.
“The idea that we’re going to do the absolutely most drastic thing, which is that there’s not just less money but no money, seems the farthest thing from” what Congress intended, Talwani said. “We’re not going to make everyone drop dead” from hunger.
Sometimes in Washington, the darkest hour is the one before dawn. So maybe there’s a chance the vicious rhetoric is a smokescreen allowing everyone to vent before they compromise.
But there’s another characteristic of modern Washington that may be more apt right now — the way that disaster always has to nearly strike before two parties mired in their ideological extremes find a sliver of common ground.
But at some point, this shutdown will end. It has to.
If the denouement does not come from a president who discovers a moral or political imperative to live up to his 2016 convention vow, “I alone can fix it,” it may emerge from a creative fudge in the Senate in which Republicans give a handful of Democratic senators political cover to vote to break the filibuster and reopen the government.
Majority Leader John Thune — who ditched his suave self-control on Wednesday to rage at Democrats in a Senate rant — struck one hopeful note when he said there was an uptick in bipartisan conversations this week. “We got members on both sides who are continuing to dialogue,” he told reporters.
But Thune doesn’t yet have the political space to offer Democrats the kind of tangible deliverables they would need. “When they’re willing to produce the votes to open up the government, we’re going to talk,” he said, restating the sticking point.
One possible endgame scenario is that the Senate could blur the sequencing of when the government reopens and talks get serious on Obamacare subsidies. But knowing how something might eventually end is easier than getting there.
Therefore, in the absence of progress, everyone had to fill the space.
“We are now beginning Day 30 of the Democrat shutdown,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, of Louisiana. “There are millions of Americans … that are bracing themselves for further pain and hardship.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York accused the administration of enacting “policy violence” by refusing to extend Obamacare subsidies while offering a $20 billion bailout to Trump’s MAGA pal President Javier Milei in Argentina.
Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming said he wasn’t worried about his own air travel as air traffic control snarls, but did “worry about the flights of thousands and thousands of people.” Mixing transportation metaphors, he accused Democrats of being “way off the rails.”
And Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York followed his warning on Wednesday that Trump “is a vindictive politician and a heartless politician and a heartless man” by accusing Republicans of bringing down “the specter of financial disaster” on Americans — including in red states — over health care.
It’s not exactly promising.
But Thune told reporters, “I’m always optimistic. Aren’t you?”
That’s a tough one, senator.
