House Speaker Mike Johnson accused Democrats in Congress on Wednesday of inserting “partisan political preferences” into the government funding fight, and said they are risking a shutdown if they don’t drop their demands.
“It doesn’t make any sense, and they’re going to lose that battle,” Johnson said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” of his Democratic colleagues.
Democrats have zeroed in on health insurance tax subsidies as their central demand in negotiations over a bill to fund the government after Sept. 30, when current funding expires.
House Republicans on Tuesday released text of a stopgap bill that would fund the government through Nov. 21.
It contained an additional $30 million for lawmakers’ security in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week.
It also provides $58 million the Trump administration had requested in order to beef up security for the Supreme Court and executive branch agencies.
But it does not contain an extension of Affordable Care Act tax credits, which are currently set to expire at the end of the year.
Republicans will need Democratic votes in the Senate — and likely the House despite its GOP majority — in order to enact any stopgap funding bill.
But Johnson said he wants to delay negotiations over any ACA extension until right before they expire, calling them “a December policy debate and decision, not a September funding matter.”
By demanding the subsidies in exchange for their votes, he said, Democrats are “trying to insert unrelated matters into the middle of a clean government extension.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work,” he added. “If the government is shut down because they make that their last stand, it will solely be blamed on Democrats.”
Both parties in Congress typically try to pin blame on the other guys for government shutdowns, which are universally unpopular with voters.
If the tax credits disappear, average ACA plan premiums could increase by roughly 75% for millions of Americans, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health policy think tank. For Americans in rural areas, they could increase by 90%.
But even a stopgap funding bill faces a difficult path forward in the Senate, where it requires 60 votes to pass.
To get it over the finish, at least seven Democrats would need to cross party lines to vote with Republicans on the bill.
This may prove more difficult this year than it has in previous shutdown battles, however.
Senate Democrats led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York are eager to avoid a repeat of the March shutdown showdown.
At the time, Schumer and other Democrats joined Republicans to fund the government for six months.
But the decision triggered blowback from Democratic voters, who accused their party of folding too fast.
“The House Republican-only spending bill fails to meet the needs of the American people and does nothing to stop the looming healthcare crisis,” Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement on Tuesday.
A prolonged shutdown could also hammer consumer sentiment and slow growth, Deutsche Bank analysts warned in a Wednesday note.
They noted the labor market has weakened over the last six months at the fastest rate since 2007, excluding the pandemic.
Under these conditions, “a negative shock” from a government shutdown could “prove more detrimental” to the economy than prior shutdowns.
