The stalemate continues.
Tuesday morning the Senate rejected John Boehner’s attempt to take the showdown into committee, a procedural move he proposed late Monday night.
The party line vote puts Congress right back where they were last night, before the first government shutdown in 17 years went into effect. Republicans still want a change to Obamacare in exchange for keeping the government open. Democrats are drawing a hard line.
The big question now is: who will blink?
The Republican conference in the House is showing signs of fracturing, but not nearly enough for Boehner to carry a deal himself.
And Barack Obama has threatened to veto any bill that touches Obamacare.
The House will return soon after the Senate, when the drama will continue.
On Tuesday’s The Daily Rundown, some politicians sounded optimistic a shutdown would be short-lived while everyone assigned blame.
On the Senate floor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pointed fingers at Democrats in Congress as culpable, though Quinnipiac polling out this morning shows that more than two to one, voters oppose shutting down the government over Obamacare.
“They’re doing this because they’d rather see the government shut down than do anything to protect the American people from the consequences of Obamacare,” said McConnell.
Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware said, “I hope and pray this gets resolved today. We’re setting a really bad example for others around the world.”
Republican Policy Chair James Lankford said he didn’t know of any new offer on the table, but that he thought the GOP proposals yesterday were “quite reasonable.”
Jessica Taylor