Democratic Senator Mark Kelly called on President Donald Trump on Thursday to get involved in the negotiations between Republican and Democratic senators to end the government shutdown, which is in its third week.
The Senate, which was unable for the ninth time to pass a stopgap funding bill to end the shutdown on Wednesday, is set to repeat that effort on Thursday morning.
That vote is, again, expected to fall short of the 60 senators needed to approve it because Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on the terms of the funding resolution.
“I think we need the president to make that happen, that he needs to engage with Mike Johnson and John Thune,” Kelly said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” referring to the Republicans who are the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, respectively.
“They seem to follow his lead on everything. That’s the way this ends,” the Arizona senator said.
The sticking point in passing a funding deal is that Democrats insist that any such bill extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of 2025.
A Democratic bill to keep in place those extra subsidies, which about 22 million Americans use to reduce the cost of their Obamacare health plans, is expected to cost nearly $1.5 trillion over a decade.
“The president has talked about how he wants this fixed. He wants these subsidies to be dealt with,” Kelly said.
“So he agrees we should open the government and we should fix the subsidy issue under the Affordable Care Act, and that’s all we want,” Kelly said. “So I don’t see what the issue is.”
Thune and other Republicans have said they would be willing to discuss whether to extend enhanced ACA tax credits after a short-term funding extension is approved.
In an interview Thursday with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Thune said, “We are happy to sit down and talk about a solution on the ACA, tax credits, but that needs to happen in a separate context, you know, away from having the government open.”
Johnson, in an interview on “Squawk Box” on Thursday, said, “This is not a health care fight. This is a very simple funding fight. It always was.”
“They have created a red herring. The subsidies don’t expire until the end of the year,” Johnson said.
“We were always planning to have the thoughtful debate and deliberation over that in the month of October and November, before the subsidies expired. They know that. They grabbed that issue from the end of the year and pulled it back into September to try to pretend like that was the issue. It never was,” Johnson said.
The speaker also said there “needs a dramatic amount of reform” with the ACA subsidies, “if indeed they’re going to be extended.”
Punchbowl News reported on Thursday that “there’s a bipartisan group of senators discussing several different potential off-ramps” to the shutdown stalemate “involving the enhanced Obamacare subsidies.”
“The group, led in part by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), is discussing the possibility of holding two side-by-side votes intended to end the shutdown,” Punchbowl reported, cited people familiar with the matter.
“The first vote would be to reopen the government, while the second would be on a one-year extension of the Obamacare enhanced premium tax credits, plus a commitment to pass a longer-term solution by a date certain.”
