Shutdown Day 22: Parties trade blame, with no end in sight

"It’s just shameful!" is how House Speaker Mike Johnson characterized the U.S. government shutdown, heading Thursday into its 23rd day and already the second-longest in the nation’s history.

Johnson (R-La.) was not accepting any blame Wednesday on the part of Republicans or President Donald Trump in saying that. He was heaping it on the other party. "Democrats keep making history, but they're doing it for all the wrong reasons," Johnson said during a news conference.

Later, top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn) was all too willing to remind of his party’s reasons. Republicans and Trump "have not made Americans’ lives better, they’ve made them worse," he said. That includes creating a "health care crisis."

By early evening, for a 12th time, Senate Democrats did not give Republicans the extra votes necessary to advance a House-passed bill to get funding flowing again to shuttered agencies. Senate Democrats stuck to their demands to add language to extend Obamacare tax subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, and to reverse some recent Medicaid cuts.

The 54-46 vote fell short of the 60 votes required to move forward, with no new Democrats crossing over to give the GOP help. The only real new twist was that before that vote — for 22-and-a-half hours — Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), held the Senate floor to warn about what he cast as Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

The government shutdown has gone on so long — second now only to the 35-day partial closure that occurred during Trump’s first term at the end of 2018 through early 2019 — that even the stopgap funding bill that has been the center of the fight is getting outdated.

As still written, it was intended to give lawmakers an extra 7 weeks from the official Oct. 1 start of this federal fiscal year through Nov. 21 to finally reach deals and write full-year bills. But in the standoff, three of those seven weeks of hoped-for extra time to negotiate have already expired.

 Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and others have begun to talk about potentially of rewriting the bill and extending the status quo spending levels later into the year, or even into early 2026.

But for that to happen, Johnson would have to call the House back to vote again — something the chamber has not done since Sept. 19. And there still would be no guarantee that Democrats would go along with that new version, either, unless their health care demands are met.