The risk of a brief U.S. government shutdown over the weekend rose Wednesday with congressional Republicans and Democrats split over a short-term spending bill needed to keep agencies running and some GOP lawmakers threatening a holdup to protest vaccine mandates.
Majority Democrats are looking to extend current agency funding into January or later given the impasse with Senate Republicans on full-year fiscal 2022 spending bills. While party leaders expressed confidence that the differences would get resolved in time, they have yet to schedule any action on a stopgap bill.
Current funding for the government expires on Friday. Democrats said they have not gotten a proposal from Republicans on how long a stopgap should last and there are growing concerns that a faction of conservatives will attempt to trigger a shutdown to block funding for President Joe Biden’s initiative requiring large private employers to either mandate vaccinations against Covid-19 or provide weekly testing.
There were hints Wednesday afternoon that the standoff over vaccine mandates could be resolved by allowing a simple-majority vote on an amendment to the stopgap bill that would remove funding to implement the vaccine mandate.
“I think that would be a very good resolution,” Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz said.
Democratic leaders had not yet weighed in, but a similar amendment failed on a party-line vote during debate on the last short-term spending bill.
“I can’t imagine we would walk back the safety precautions,” House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, said. He called any attempt to defund the government over vaccine mandates “nonsensical.”
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday that he thinks there will be no gap in government funding. “We won’t shut down,” he said.
Senate Hurdle
Meeting the end-of-week deadline will require cooperation from all Senate Republicans. Although there is likely enough support from GOP senators to pass a stopgap, any one senator can demand extra procedural steps in the Senate that can drag on for nearly a week. That could come from the effort by Cruz and a group of other GOP senators to link spending measure to blocking Biden administration’s workplace rule on vaccinations and testing.
Kansas Senator Roger Marshall, who sponsored the vaccine amendment on the last stopgap bill, led a Nov. 3 letter signed by 10 other Senate Republicans pledging to oppose all efforts to implement the vaccine mandate, including by objecting to government funding bills.