[S]enator Patrick Leahy is lobbying his Republican colleagues to support a Democratic plan that would end a government shutdown that is now 10 days old.
Democrats will take control of the House on Thursday and intend to bring two bills immediately to the floor. One includes six measures that would fund agencies like the Interior and Agriculture Departments until September, the end of fiscal 2019. The other bill would maintain current homeland security spending levels until early February.
The bills do not provide funding for President Donald Trump’s border wall, which the president says is a deal breaker. Senate leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said he won’t bring a bill to the Senate floor without the president’s support.
Leahy on Monday accused the president of holding the government hostage over the wall funding and urged his Republican colleagues to support what he called a “bipartisan” solution.
“For 10 days [Trump] has held the federal government hostage in an attempt to force us to pay for an ineffective and expensive wall on the southern border, a wall he promised that Mexico would pay for,” Leahy said in a statement released Monday. “It will not work. He does not have the votes.”
But neither do Democrats, which has left many wondering who will blink first. Trump tweeted Tuesday afternoon that soon-to-be Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, did not want to start he speakership with a shutdown.
“Let’s make a deal?” Trump wrote.
Democrats are pressuring Senate Republicans to buck the president and support the bills, assuming they make it out of the House, or share responsibility for hundreds of thousands of unpaid government workers and unfunded federal programs.
“If Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans refuse to support the first bill, then they are complicit with President Trump in continuing the Trump shutdown and in holding the health and safety of the American people and workers’ paychecks hostage over the wall,” Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader from New York, said in a statement Monday.
Leahy, vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, touted the many other elements of the spending bills in his own statement Monday. He said they include additional funding for the opioid epidemic, infrastructure investments, resources to protect the environment and support for allies crucial to national security.
“It’s time this stopped,” Leahy said. “The path forward is now clear, and I strongly encourage Senate Republicans to support and pass this bipartisan compromise.”
