As Shutdown Staggers On, Stopgap Funding Window Shrinks

As the government shutdown wears on, Republicans have a problem: They’re running low on the time their stopgap funding bill was supposed to buy for bipartisan budget negotiations.

The stopgap funding bill to extend President Joe Biden-era spending levels has failed to pass more than a half-dozen times in the Senate due to Democrat opposition. The seven weeks of funding it was supposed to provide have shrunk down to just over five weeks.

On Wednesday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., urged Democrats in the Senate to pass the short-term funding extension passed in the House, but noted that the funding extension’s window is shrinking.

“We have big differences [with Democrats] we need to negotiate, and the clean [continuing resolution] that we passed over to the Senate does not resolve those differences. It just gives us some more time to have that negotiation,” Scalise told reporters.

“And by the way, that clock is getting sooner every day,” he said. “November 21 is not extending every day that [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer continues this charade that he’s playing with the lives of millions of American families. That date is going to get closer every day, where we’re not going to have as much time to negotiate our differences.”

That creates a difficult outlook on Capitol Hill for any future attempt to fund the government.

Even if Republicans managed to get Democrats to vote for the continuing resolution, it would set up another fiscal cliff in a few weeks, since the Democrats could once again vote against funding the government in order to back up their demands.

In the Senate, leadership is trying to break the impasse by teeing up a Thursday vote on a Department of Defense funding bill.

“If the Democrats can see the regular appropriations process running more smoothly, that might encourage them,” the Senate Appropriations Committee chairwoman, Rep. Susan Collins, R-Maine, recently said of the attempt to keep the funding process humming amid the shutdown. “If we can show that we can move the appropriations bills, there’s absolutely no justification or rationale for a government shutdown.”

Meanwhile, in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., still has not called the chamber back into session. The House has passed three of 12 appropriations bills.

“I think appropriators want to get back to work … . I know every House Republican does, but we’ve got to get the lights turned back on, and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats have to vote to do that,” Johnson said of resuming work in the House, although the government shutdown doesn’t impede the House Republican leadership’s ability to reconvene the chamber.

Johnson also addressed the idea of a longer-term continuing resolution, which he considers useless, given Democrats’ intransigence so far.

“With regard to the timeline of the CR, it would do us no good to pass yet another CR out of the House, because it will meet the same fate. Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats want to close the government down. They are gleeful about this,” he said.

Another cause for concern is the fact that some Democrats are declaring that cleanly funding President Donald Trump’s administration is somehow immoral. 

“Democrats have no obligation to vote for a budget that funds corruption and totalitarianism,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., wrote Tuesday on the social media platform X of Republicans’ bill to extend Biden-era spending for a few weeks. “People don’t want Democrats to wilt. They want us to fight.”

If anything pulls Congress out of the quagmire, it could be the apparently increasing political futility of extending the shutdown for Democrats.

A new poll from YouGov/The Economist shows that Americans are increasingly blaming Democrats for the shutdown, with 33% now blaming Democrats in Congress—up from 30% last week. A higher percentage, 39%, blame Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown, down from 41% last week. Historically, the party that controls the White House tends to take the blame for shutdowns among the general public.

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