Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer laid out a new Democratic counterproposal for ending the government shutdown: attaching a one-year extension of soon-to-expire Affordable Care Act subsidies to a spending stopgap that would reopen agencies.
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“This is a reasonable offer that reopens the government, deals with health care affordability and begins a process of negotiating reforms to the ACA tax credits for the future,” Schumer said. “Now the ball is in the Republicans’ court. We need Republicans to just say, ‘Yes.”
The offer generated some quick GOP backlash, however. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) posted on X that it would unduly benefit health insurance companies to blindly extend the subsidies: “Another year of insane profits at the expense of consumers and American taxpayers,” he wrote.
Schumer’s counteroffer came after Democrats met privately for hours Thursday to try to find a path forward that would unify the caucus. It’s a shift from the start of the shutdown, when Democrats included a permanent extension of the Obamacare subsidies in an alternative to the GOP-led continuing resolution that passed the House.
Shortly before Schumer’s speech, a group of roughly a dozen members of the Senate Democratic Caucus — including the No. 2 leader, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois — met in a Capitol basement office. The group included senators who have been negotiating with Republicans about a path out of the shutdown, as well as other Democratic senators viewed as potential swing votes.
A person familiar with the conversation, granted anonymity to describe the private discussion, said that “tone and approach” of the senators in the meeting “doesn’t reflect what you see on the floor.”
Archived at https://archive.is/mSNKC
Ok, so the rational political play here is that Schumer uses the recent blue wave to put pressure on the GOP: give up on the ACA attacks for a year and we will re-open the government. The GOP are now put into a position where they cave to the Dems or they are directly responsible for prolonging the shutdown, undercutting the GOP narrative for who to blame for the shutdown.
The gamble, the risk, is that the GOP accepts the offer and the Dems look like they cave. It sucks but that was the risk for this bold fucking gamble by Schumer. I hate him and wish he would lose his job but this was a smart play. There is no history of the GOP working with the Dems in recent history so they wouldn’t be inclined to start now.
It’s worth the risk. A functional federal government, no matter how terrible it is, is still better than one that isn’t. Peoples lives are at stake here.